As above... we think that page is pretty useless. What do other people have on their home pages?
All of my Moodle's are development ones, so only me reading them... but.... the themes I develop have places for marketing spots, carousels, horizontal block regions, alerts etc. So a place to put generic information to be seen by all before logging in and getting their dashboard with more personalised content. So if you're using Moodle to sell courses then it is a good place to advertise them, for example: www.moodlebites.com run by HRDNZ, a Moodle Partner.
That’s an interesting point that I didn’t think of.
I always tend to have login forced as a requirement. This means the user lands on their Dashboard.
This makes the home page an orphaned destination.
It probably applies to many but I don’t sell courses. Hence, “what’s the point of the home page?”
Howard, this is a great question to ask. With the rising popularity and usefulness of "Dashboards", what role does the front page play?
My cyber school serves 6th graders - seniors. We contemplated making the Dashboard the home page of our moodle, but there are feature that seems only the front page can serve so we have not made that switch. Here is what we like about the home page:
1- the main forum - we have set up 40 weeks worth of announcements that automatically change every Monday (using the forum post's dates restrictions) which tells students how many points of activities they need to submit that week in each course to stay on track for the semester. This eliminates the need to post this information in every course.
2- ability to add activities for authenticated uses to participate in. We occasionally add choice modules and questionnaire modules for the students and parents to partake in - the front page makes it easy for everyone to access these optional activities.
3- LTI connection - we use black board collaborate as our Virtual School Offices. We add an LTI to the main menu block and link that LTI to an image at the top of our front page. When the VOs are closed, we simply hide the image and activity. To do this on a dashboard would require us to constantly "refresh" everyone's dashboard, which would then make users loose their dashboard customizations.
4- theme mobile mode -- the front page just looks better on a mobile phone than the dashboard (imo). We keenoie front page as a simple page with few items but it serves as a consistent landing page for our users before they go to their courses or dashboard.
That sounds about it for us. Until I can find simpler ways to move these items to the dashboard, the front page will remain relevant for our use-case. But I'm definitely fascinated to hear other users' experiences and opinions.
The home page is useful for many organisations - probably for orientation, daily messages, navigation and general information.
Custom front page inserts also give a great deal of flexibility in layout and content. Such inserts can contain html, javascript and php or a mix so the potential is as big as your imagination.
Probably many organisations which have multiple integrated systems already in place may find it less useful - just another place to hold duplicate information and thus increase maintenance overhead.
So useless for some, not everyone.
Hi Howard
I though you are referring to _my_ Home Page and was insulted. Grrr.
Oh, yes. The Home Page of a Moodle site, when the URL is the domain name? It is always the Site in Moodle jargon. The Dashboard has a /my suffix. (Am I mistaken?)
All the Moodle sites I manage have defaulthomepage = site. I find dashboard is for those who don't know where they come from, according to the motto here on moodle.org "everybody is sent here by Google". In contrast the site is a common entry page with Site news, Tip of the Week, urgent calls, etc.
I though you are referring to _my_ Home Page and was insulted. Grrr.
Oh, yes. The Home Page of a Moodle site, when the URL is the domain name? It is always the Site in Moodle jargon. The Dashboard has a /my suffix. (Am I mistaken?)
All the Moodle sites I manage have defaulthomepage = site. I find dashboard is for those who don't know where they come from, according to the motto here on moodle.org "everybody is sent here by Google". In contrast the site is a common entry page with Site news, Tip of the Week, urgent calls, etc.