Ivana, you have hit upon some interesting "how do you manage topics in a course" questions.
On the positive side of things:
- I know of no way to automatically put students into a highlight topic. Sorry.
- I know of no automatic way to reorder topics so that the current topic is first. Sorry.
- As far as I know, none of the four major LMSs (B, C, D, or M) can do what you wish to do.
- In all four LMSs, you can manually reorder topics. I thought about reordering topics, as you suggest, 20 years ago when I began using Blackboard. I recall doing it the first time that I used Blackboard, and it was a pain to do so. So I always keep my topics arranged from first to last, sequentially. Yes, drag-and-drop makes moving topics around easier, but it is still too time consuming and error prone. So even though it might make so sense to you, I would suggest that if you were to do this for a course that had, for example, 20 topics, you would eventually abort.
On the positive side of things:
- Moodle is the only major LMS that allows you to highlight the current topic. This is an extremely valuable feature, one that even students love, so that everyone knows what the current topic is. However, it is still up to the instructor to remember to manually highlight the current topic, and many instructors find this to be too much work (yep, less than a minute) or do not know that Moodle supports this feature. (I and others in the Canvas Community have asked Canvas to add this feature, but Canvas doesn't understand why it is important to highlight the current topic. Oh well.)
- In my courses, I use the Collapsed Topics plugin, which allows students to compress topics that are finished. Collapsed topics will remember which topics they have closed. (Canvas has a similar feature, but when students enter a course, all topics are always open.)
- Moodle provides "activity completion" checkboxes that instructors can set up. This is an extremely valuable feature that allows students to know which activities they have completed. D2L had this feature. BB and Canvas do not. (I and others in the Canvas Community have asked Canvas to add this feature, but Canvas doesn't understand why it is important to highlight the current topic. Oh well.)
So you might be left showing your instructors these valuable Moodle features, along with what features do not exist, and hope that you instructors will use them to their advantages.
I give my students this video that explains how I structure my courses. Take note of video chapter marker 5, Topics, chapter; and chapter marker 14, Checklist and Activity Completion.
