Moodle documentation: Moodle Help Files

Moodle documentation: Moodle Help Files

by Gene Koo -
Number of replies: 12

While Moodle isn't the most intuitive of LMS's, I still severely underestimated the difficulty learners would have doing simple things like uploading files -- perhaps because so many of ours are recent and unwilling digital immigrants (refugees may be a better analogy).

At any rate, to save my own sanity I have started creating help files consisting not just of a glossary (which, btw, would be a great resource to have available to all of us as an uploadable XML file) but also Flash demos, produced in Wink. The first of these is now up here. Would've been nice if the HTML editor didn't keep stripping the Flash code from the glossary entry -- but making it a separte resource works OK. Would love your feedback; I'll post more as I find the time to create them. Am looking forward to the new release of Wink, which should have audio -- rumors of a beta test run rampant!

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In reply to Gene Koo

Svar: Moodle Help Files

by Anders Berggren -
A lot of varying forms of documentation
may well be needed. Your demos look
nice and it is exciting to hear the news
about Wink. Did you know there's a
in progress as well?
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In reply to Anders Berggren

Re: Svar: Moodle Help Files

by Roland Gesthuizen -
Anders, I wonder if we be able to create tutorials with wink and attach the flash files to posts in this documentation project?

Gene, your little tutorial is fantastic. smile


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In reply to Roland Gesthuizen

Svar: Re: Svar: Moodle Help Files

by Anders Berggren -
I think that would be technically possible.
Helen Foster is probably a better person
to ask though. Another, technically minor
but from a usability perspective important,
problem is how to design such a part of the
Information Architecture for the documentation.
I am thinking of either some specific area for
Wink-made files or whether any format that the
documentation could be made in should be
categorised under the same topic. E.g. everything
and all kinds of material concerning 'forums' in
one place.
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In reply to Gene Koo

Re: Moodle documentation: Moodle Help Files

by Gene Koo -

Someone did post Moodle terms in Glossary XML, but it's oriented towards content creators, not users. I'll be editing these for users and uploading them when done.


Thanks for the heads-up on MoodleDocs, Anders. My quick scan of the page shows that there's no steps taken towards end-user documentation, so maybe these files will be a start.

Again, any feedback would be helpful, esp. if from the eye of a total web neophyte!

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In reply to Gene Koo

Re: Moodle documentation: Moodle Help Files

by Ulrike Montgomery -
 Gene,

Just like you I have made the observation that many of my colleagues have difficulty doing things like uploading files. I really like you idea of the short, simple flash demos. I hope you'll find time to do more. Maybe I'll get my 'digital native' students to do some, too
Thanks a lot for setting a link to the 'digital natives' article. I had heard this term before but I couldn't find the article. I think every teacher of the digital immigrant generation should read it. I will definitely help us understand our students better.

Cheeers,

Ulrike
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In reply to Ulrike Montgomery

Re: Moodle documentation: Moodle Help Files

by Gene Koo -

I'm hoping to find time this weekend to do one on posting to a discussion forum, including the concept of subscribing and unsubscribing. (I wish Moodle had thread-only subscriptions, but that's another topic). Now that I'm looking at it, that would cover 95% of our activities.

I'm also building out a course terminology glossary covering words like "upload" and such, and hope to have something to share soon.

Ulrike -- honestly, what I feel we need are more digital immigrants explaining this technology to other immigrants. This stuff may be too intuitive for natives to figure out how to teach!

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In reply to Gene Koo

Re: Moodle documentation: Moodle Help Files

by Gene Koo -

Here's the second tutorial, on how to participate in discussion forums. It's quite a bit longer than the first, because it had to explain:

  1. How to post replies to existing discussions;
  2. How to post a new discussion;
  3. How to quote (since this isn't built into the Moodle forum, though it should be);
  4. How to change views of the forum;
  5. How to subscribe/unsubscribe (though, to be honest, I forgot to do this so I finagled it in Wink after the fact)
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In reply to Gene Koo

Re: Moodle documentation: Moodle Help Files

by Amy Groshek -
I agree it'd be great to have a central location for student resources like this. I've built two for my university using Captivate, one concerning how to post an uploaded document to a moodle forum, and one that shows how to upload assignments.

I've seen cheat sheets for students before in the moodle exchange. Would that be an appropriate place to collect such resources?
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In reply to Amy Groshek

Re: Moodle documentation: Moodle Help Files

by David Brighton -

Hi All, I agree with the issue of student centric documentation. We had a webcast from Martin last week (at the JISC London Moodle Regional User Group) where he mentioned this for version (shuffles papers) 1.6, which was supposed to be released as beta this week so it will be interesting to see what that means. It always seemed a bit odd to me that the documentation was very heavy on developer/teacher/admin content with not a lot on student use. I started a thread to discuss this issue in the Documentation section  http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=42148, but to me it seems most logical that the default documentation/help is aimed at student users.

From what we are all doing you can see that there is a huge amount of duplication, as I too have been busy creating nice little winks to plug the gaps! I have even started to create a user course a bit like the versions of teacher courses out there and was planning to share it here with the hope that others would contribute bits and reshare it

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In reply to David Brighton

Re: Moodle documentation: Moodle Help Files

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
Remember that there is not only heaps of help documentation built-in to Moodle already from the start in the form of those little yellow buttons, but our aim is to make Moodle intuitive enough for most people to not need to use them.

It's perhaps more important for teachers to know how to create good environments for their classes, because they can be there to help students with any conceptual problems they may have.  Teachers have a lot more decisions to make, too.

Student-level tutorials are more difficult to do because each teacher's class may look different depending on options chosen, and so something for rank beginners on one site may not work for another.

However, the more the merrier!  Thanks for helping improve documentation!
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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Moodle documentation: Moodle Help Files

by Gene Koo -

Unlike a Google-type interface where only one action is possible (or at least, immediately obvious), Moodle is by its nature complex no matter how much work goes into the UI. Perhaps many of you work with more tech-savvy individuals, but we have folks who do not possess basic computer vocabulary like "upload" and "browse." I have been surprised/shocked that even our more savvy individuals have a hard time navigating our site.

I would of course love that Moodle be more intuitive, but as you say, Martin, the issue is that we all use Moodle in different ways. Both students and teachers complain to me about things as simple as the course main page and how the units are not intuitively laid out.

It's quite possible that we are not optimizing our layout within bounds of what is possible in Moodle, or that the types of courses we run are different than other Moodlers. (Our courses are activity-centered, so the website both hosts online discussions and scaffolds offline activities).

That said, most of my team is always accusing me of overestimating technical competence, and I am usually the last to recommend or want to undertake development of a student-oriented tutorial. Just yesterday we argued over whether to create a screenshot-by-screenshot paper (because no one likes using the Web!) tutorial for teachers on how to grade assignments!

The yellow help buttons are good for people like me, but still not "dumb" enough for your average neophyte. I don't mean to put down our own teachers, but I've found you can never underestimate people's technical abilities, particularly in the nonprofit sector.

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In reply to Gene Koo

Re: Moodle documentation: Moodle Help Files

by Evelyn Smith-Stahle -
I understand your concern. The first online course I ever taught, I had to meet my students, open e-mail accounts for them, teach them how to read e-mail, etc. (I am a teacher trainer)

The way we solved this in my Teacher Ed program, is that we have a previous f2f course in which students are taught computer literacy skills.
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