General help

Just a few thoughts on this subject:

Change is never an easy thing - if you've grown accustomed to seeing the manual completion checkboxes in the right margin of your course page, the switch to 'more user-friendly' clickable buttons is a big one. Also, it takes up plenty of space on the course page, which may result in a bit of a cluttered course, with various cues for users, who don't exactly know where to click next...

Why were there so many manual completion checkboxes in the first place? - If your course's right margin was filled with manual completion checkboxes, but you're now confronted with an interface that changed quite drastically, you could start by rethinking the purpose of these boxes first. The default setting in Moodle for activity completion is to manually mark as complete, even if this doesn't really make sense: this is added to labels, uploaded file resources, pages, books, URLs as well as all other activities or resources you may have. Taking the time to properly set up the activity completion default settings as well as their implementation at course level, is something that can reduce clutter in your course. The tools are there, both for site admins and for course owners.

There are settings in 3.11 and onwards (I think) allowing you to hide or display completion conditions for activities on the course page. This way, the conditions themselves would only be displayed after opening an activity or resource you'd want to track for completion. Although this doesn't affect the manual completion, it does help you create a cleaner course page.

There's even a nice article on Moodle.com dedicated to this topic (among other).

And finally: some 3.11 themes still use their own take on the checkboxes instead of the buttons that are becoming the standard...

From what I've seen of Moodle 4 it's just the beginning.

I'm just copying the comment I made it that ticket. I don't mind the change - I do mind the fallout from the change because it doesn't just involve me in my (very large) institution.

"I wanted to ask if all the UI testing was done with new, empty courses or with horrible old ones that have been accumulating material for years?

We have hundreds of courses were the course (despite advice to the contrary) has basically been build on the course page itself. I'm genuinely worried that we're going to get loads of horrified users (and that's support tickets for me).

If the various University committees that worry about these things get cold feet and we think Moodle 4.0 means rebuilding courses from scratch then the inevitable next step is "should we consider alternative solutions" and we'll end up running Canvas or something.

It's absolutely vital that HQ has considered the migration from the previous "look". If the prevailing attitude - and I don't know - is "they'll just have to catch up" then it's going to be a disaster."

We're using OpenLMS to host and this caught them off guard as well. Unfortunately with v3.11 rolling to production on Dec. 30th, there's not much they feel they can do and are not wanting to invest resources in maintaining a forked version from Moodle HQ given that 4.0 is around the corner. I'm getting shrugs from people who don't really see how it drastically changes the navigation of a course — let alone the functionality. So frustrating and completely avoidable if UX designers saw the impact of the change to actual courses!

Part of what kills me is that when we set the defaults for Activity Completion, we choose to enable manual completion options for a handful of activity types (url, webpage, book). As others have pointed out, this is really helpful for students (feedback proves it) who are trying to track their own progress through materials.

However if our instructors don't like the manual button on every activity, I can't make changes to the defaults and have them recursively change all courses. It's a course by course fix or a major database change. To be fair, this is the case for any changes to activity completion defaults but I'm left wondering what action to take over the next 2 weeks of holiday time. Do I prep our users (who won't be reading email) of the "hey, surprise!!"? Do I turn off the checkboxes completely in the course homepage as Dave above might do?

Thanks @Visvanath for posting before vs after. Hard to capture the scroll of death in a single image but if I could, it'd be attached to this post

-Josh

Hiya All
Again, think I may be coming late to the party but possibly a solution to some of the comments above (although it does not remove either names of Activities/resources, nor the size of the 'I've done it' box).

Make all lessons, including metalanguage and instructions, in Books. Have one Book for each week/lesson/topic (your choice) in one section. Stealth all resources in separate sections below and link them to the books. You can make it pretty etc whilst providing students with a pedagogical process to follow and therefore reducing extrinsic cognitive loading. It also keeps the course neat, minimalist, uncluttered, text free (no need to write masses on the course face) and easily navigated.
However, what I think is the issue here is the 'Im done' stuff - we used a checklist - it is a little clunky and the colours are a bit on the bright side, and needs to played with before it works right. But once done, it was very useful. Add the checklist to each of the resources sections below the lessons and, with activity completion on, students (and teachers) can see what has been accessed or completed at a glance. Teachers can choose what is shown or recorded. We used it for attendance, students would complain that they were there in the remote classes, but having told them to do XYZ by x no of hours after class - being able to provide the screenshot in about 7 seconds soon had them working a smidgen harder ;)

https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_checklist

Hope that that helps