Timeline block experience: We want your feedback!

Timeline block experience: We want your feedback!

by Barbara Ramiro -
Number of replies: 10
Picture of Moodle HQ team

Hi everyone,

As part of the Moodle 4.0 project, we are looking at improving the user experience for the Timeline block. If you could choose one or two things to work on, what would they be and why?

Also, if you want to be a part of the workshop in line with this project, please register your interest here.

Cheers,

The UX team

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In reply to Barbara Ramiro

Re: Timeline block experience: We want your feedback!

by Chris Kenniburg -
Timeline block for students
Use tabs for the following all-in-one block:
Tab 1- Upcoming due dates and activity lists as it currently exists
Tab 2- View recent announcements from course news forum and allow commenting in block for students.  A communication feed from courses in facebook scroll type style.
Tab 3- Upcoming events from calendar feeds or actual calendar.
Tab 4- 

Timeline block for teachers
Use tabs for the following:
Tab 1- Activities and items that need grading or teacher action
Tab 2- Upcoming events from calendar feeds or actual calendar
Tab 3- Make announcement/post to course news feed by selecting course and making a post.

With the new My Courses page there will be a lot of new real estate on the homepage/dashboard without the course overview block.  Beyond the timeline block, there is a lot of opportunity to pull data out and display it for users.  I think a better way to communicate or keep parents/students on track with what is next in a course would be ideal.  That is why I put in the tab to collect and display News Forum posts in a feed. 
The forum posts provide context for what the student might see in the upcoming activity tab.   The teacher would benefit from seeing an overview of what needs their attention with grading.  

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head.  
Pulling communication into the homepage outside of each course would be beneficial.  

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In reply to Barbara Ramiro

Re: Timeline block experience: We want your feedback!

by Kovacs Gabor -

Dear Barbara,

The depracated function "course news" to see unread forum posts at the dashboard should be really useful to add back in, our students really miss that feature after the upgrade from 3.5.

So the possibility to add notifications into the timeline block which does not include a deadline or completion status would be really useful - the most important would be the forums. 

A few topics mentioning this:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=426395
https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=389592

Thanks for your consideration!

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In reply to Barbara Ramiro

Re: Timeline block experience: We want your feedback!

by Matthias R. -

It is already a great improvement that the block is placed more prominently in the middle in the new design. On smartphones, it was often not seen at all because it was displayed further down there. I like that!

During the time when many students had to study at home, some teachers used text boxes (or other activities) that had a manual activity completion to set tasks for students. Sometimes no completion date was set. Many then wondered why these things did not appear in the timeline, which they saw as a ToDo list.

So maybe it would be an idea to add an option to show activities without dates or missing manual completions.

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In reply to Matthias R.

Re: Timeline block experience: We want your feedback!

by Helen Foster -
Picture of Moodle HQ team

Matthias, good to hear that you like the positioning of the Timeline block in the middle of the Dashboard. smile

Regarding showing activities without due dates in the Timeline block, how about setting an 'Expect completed on' date in the Activity completion settings?

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In reply to Helen Foster

Re: Timeline block experience: We want your feedback!

by Matthias R. -
Of course, I know the possibility to simply add a date for the activity completion, even to a text field. But inexperienced teachers don't necessarily know that.

The feedback from the students was that they found it annoying that they had to search through all the courses again for assignments because they couldn't rely on the timeline.

So it would be good to have a place where all the assignments and activities that still need to be done show up - even the ones without a date. Whether the timeline is the right place for this, with a label "to be done in the future" or "without date" is of course the question. Such a place would be helpful in any case.
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In reply to Matthias R.

Re: Timeline block experience: We want your feedback!

by Randy Thornton -


"even the ones without a date."

I think this is very important principle: in the world of fully online courses, many sites are self-paced. Having to rely on dates - especially absolute dates - should never an assumption. As Matthias says, students find this annoying since they still have to hunt for such information. Teachers as well. It may even be better to have no information at all than incomplete information.

Years ago, there was a web site called "Upcoming" which was just that: what do you have that is upcoming to do. Some things may have dates, but many may not: but you still have to do them soon.

I think focusing on "Timeline" as a concept makes the block really only useful in brick and mortar, absolute date, group work scenarios. But that is only a small part of the online edu world now.

The real problem you are trying to solve on the Dashboard is give people the overview of what must be done next, what is upcoming, regardless of dates.

For example, if I just did an assignment in section 2, then I must be moving on to section 3. Just hanging the data on specifically set due dates may be easy to code, but is not how many people work (which is why on many sites I support, we just remove the block altogether.)



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In reply to Randy Thornton

Re: Timeline block experience: We want your feedback!

by Sander Bangma -
Hi Randy and Matthias,

Thanks very much for this feedback. For 4.0, the timeline block is still tied to dates. I think what both of you are referring to is task management in a broader sense. This is certainly something we want to look into more closely for next releases.
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In reply to Randy Thornton

Re: Timeline block experience: We want your feedback!

by Bob Gilmore -
I want to add my support to this problem. As it stands the timeline / calendar don't work for my organisation as we have learners enrolling at different times all year. To set dates, we'd need to set overrides for every activity on every course for every learner, and we're just not going to do that.

Ideally, one or both of these would solve the issue:

  • Time line shows any activity flagged with an activity completion with the completion criteria in some kind of "upcoming section"
  • Every activity and course related date needs to have a relative setting, at least initially to course enrolment date - e.g. "expect completion 3 weeks after enrolment date". Maybe this could be expanded on at some point, for example "due 3 weeks after completion of specified activity" or "Close the quiz 1 week after it opened" or even "Reminder to grade 1 day after submission"
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In reply to Bob Gilmore

Re: Timeline block experience: We want your feedback!

by Przemek Kaszubski -
I would chime in here on the note regarding exceptions (i.e. user and group overrides) - such overrides REALY have to display correctly for individuals (and group members) that have been given them.

ALSO, let's not forget that in Assignments it's also possible to grant an extension of the due date - those extensions should also show correctly for students in the Calendar, in their upcoming events block in courses (if used in a course), as well as in the Timeline lists of course - if the assignment is not yet done, if another attempt has been opened / granted for the student (and work is not yet submitted), and (possibly also) if a completed submissions has been reverted back to the draft status by the teacher.
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In reply to Barbara Ramiro

Re: Timeline block experience: We want your feedback!

by David Pinyol Gras -
Hi,
In Moodle 3.10 we can order events by date or long course name. I don't like to see courses without events. I am enrolled in more than 30 courses as a teacher or student and it is very tiring to scroll down the course list without any events.

David
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