Hi Everyone
I work at a business college, where we use Moodle a lot, both to self-instruction coursers and for blended learning. Many of my users are colleges students 16- 20 years old, and therefore I am very interested in making Moodle, a nice and visual inviting place. We try to stay clear of to many costume developed features, as want to keep the cost and hassle of keeping the site updated down, so we use a lot of cool plugins from the moodle.org, but nothing else.
I want to show you, how we work, and hopefully get some input and inspiration form you about cool user-friendly features.
A. We use marketing blocks to show all the enrolled coursers on the home page, I would have liked to use the dashboard more, but I have not found a good way to make it easy and visual for the student.
B. We use grid format as course format, with one page pr. section, the students like having the course divided into chapters, so they feel the progression trough the course. We have some bugs with alignment of the header and the boxes.
C. Each section, we try to keep at a
size that doesn’t discouraged the student, and at the same time keep them inside
the system. We use a lot of labels, to write the text directly into Moodle, embed
video and audio if possible. To prevent scrolling forever, we made a generico template
that fold the text in a label into a button(and unfold with a red line right),
and then we use the manual completions tracking to help the student keep track
of how far we have come. We would like a more bookmark like feature, that
automated how far the student have read, but I have not found anything for that
yet.
D. In text book assignment and extra
information is often highlighted with in a special box or color, we wanted
something similar for our Moodle. Therefore we have upscaled the icons for
Quiz, files and assignments to be more visual, making the student aware of the
change from reading to assignment etc. (Adaptable have extended these possibilities
too now, and we are experimenting with these) I love the fact that Adaptable
have made this possibility and miss it very much when we have to move course to
other themes.
E. We also made an extra generico label box for assignment that doesn’t have to be handed in. It works by having the blue pencil icon and the text when you enter the page, when you click the icon, the blue box unfold to show the rest of the information. We really like that fold in and out feature, and would love for that to be possible for assignments, and files too.
Do you have good ideas about ways to make Moodle more visual then please write comments.
Moodle version: 3.2.5+
Theme: Adaptable
Plugins: Grid format, Generico