Need suggestions for Moodle UI in activities-based professional development (high-bandwidth pics enclosed)

Need suggestions for Moodle UI in activities-based professional development (high-bandwidth pics enclosed)

by Gene Koo -
Number of replies: 1

We have been using Moodle for over a year now to support our distance courses for legal aid attorneys across the US. Our courses balance among live web conferencing, asynchronous discussions, and activities (e.g. roleplaying simulations).

Perhaps this should go in the developers' forum, but I wanted to start here to see if there were changes possible without delving into PHP.

We have found that our use of the Moodle main page, and our layout of individual assignments, are confusing. My colleagues want us to move in the direction of making the site more like a paper syllabus for an in-person course, but I'm suspecting that this is moving in the wrong direction away from what makes the most sense for the web.

Here is an example of a course outline:

Course Outline 1

...later on:

Outline 2

One problem that we have is that we list our activities down the middle column (what else can you do?) and students (and teachers) get confused between the topic outline and the "Upcoming Events" list (which, since this course is not in session, is empty in the screenshot you see here).

If we could rewrite Moodle, I guess we would turn the outline listing into a calendar, perhaps even with clickable icons that enable you to download vCalendar files. Remember that our students are full-time employed professionals whose think in calendar time slots, not week-long course blocks.

But barring that, what else can we do to make the course outline more intuitive given our approach, which hopefully you can glean enough of from the screenshots to be able to advise?

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In reply to Gene Koo

Part 2: Activity Layout

by Gene Koo -

What I've been seeking in a product like Moodle is something in which assignments are really shell objects that collect other objects together. Our assignments are often multi-step affairs: read something, do an activity (often offline), post your response, then talk about it. Either this isn't what Moodle was built for, or we're not visually presenting these actions the right way.

Here is what we are now doing after much experimentation:

Assignment view

As you can see, on the left column (done by CSS) I have two boxes. One lists associated resources. I found that listing these resources anywhere in the outline (see first post) confuses the heck out of people, especially because these resources are better thought of as adjuncts to an assignment, not standalone objects. Thus, there are hard links inside a styled floating div.

(To prevent myself from going crazy when instantiating a new course, I created a meta-course that contains all of these resources, providing me with a stable URL to which I can hard-link and thereby enable copying courses without breaking the links).

You'll also see the second box providing both due dates and time estimates for the sub-activities. This is because many of our activities have many sub-parts. Now, we could instantiate each activity separately, thereby eliminating the need for redundant due dates, but (a) Moodle styling of the default due date box is horrible -- and who knows if XSLT will make my life better, and (b) again back to the outline, this would create enormous clutter.

Finally, how many of you consider posting to an online discussion forum an "assignment" with a due date? We find that insisting on participation is the only way to get busy professionals into the conversation, but it's awkward on the UI to tell someone to post to the forum as an assignment, but then have the forum sit somewhere else. It's also technically annoying not to have that be treated as an assignment with a due date and with Moodle tracking lateness, etc. as it would for anything else. I've suggested elsewhere the idea of converting the workshop into something like a rotisserie, to the sound of thunderous silence.
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