Hi Moodlers!
Our course format Designer is now available in the Plugins directory. And it has received the reviewer’s choice award for bringing new UI and UX concepts.
At the very core of Designer, there are two basic principles: (1) flexible layouts for sections and (2) clear and concise completion/progress information.
(1) Layouts for sections
In a normal Moodle course, all activities in all sections look the same. They do have different icons (and colors in 4.0+), but essentially it's an icon, a title, a description and some form of completion indicator. But not all activities *are* the same. Some are actual course content, some are optional side resources, some are mandatory, some are part of a linear course flow. Because of that, we believe that it's important to give teachers a choice to display activities differently.
Let's look at a simple example, a three week course:
Section Zero — "General"
Announcements
Course syllabus
Discussion forum
Section One — "Week 1"
Reading material
Video lesson
Assignment of the week
Section One — "Week 2"
Reading material
Video lesson
Assignment of the week
Section One — "Week 3"
Reading material
Video lesson
Assignment of the week
Section zero contains activities that are valid throughout the course, and for the sake of our argument, they do not require completion, they are just there. But the activites in sections 1-3 are the actual course contents; that's what students should actually learn respectively complete in the corresponding week. That's why Designer allows teachers to use a different layout for section zero than the other sections. In this case, we'd suggest the links layout, which is very clean and uses very little space, for the section zero. And the list (or cards) layout for the sections 1-3.
The initial release of Designer provides three layouts (we'll add more in the next releases):
- Links (similar to the default layout)
- List
- Cards
- Type (icon + name)
- Title
- Description (expandable)
- Visits count
- Call to action
- Status (completion status + due date; more on that in the next chapter)
(2) Completion / progress indicators
The completion system in Moodle is amazing. It provides so much control about the course flow, but we think that with a few tweaks, it can be so much better. The obvious suspect is a section progress indicator (which has been introduced by other formats already, most notably the tiles format, Workplace's list format, collapsible sections and a few others).
There's a lot of discussion going on currently about the introduction of completion badges (student activity completion). Some like it, some don't like it. As usual. We believe that teachers should have a choice wether they want to show or hide them. And if they hide them, without loosing the information about the completion status entirely. That's why we've built a custom completion element which indicates the current status of the *whole* activity in a clear and concise way:
- incomplete
- to be completed at a certain date
- completed on date
- due (to be completed today)
- overdue (to be completed in the past)
In addition to the two key features above, we've added a few additional things that we find helpful:
- Collapsible sections
- Sections per page with a button to go to the section (because too many students don't realise they can click on the title....)
What's next?
We're already working on the next version which will introduce the following features:
- Allow the teacher to choose which elements (title, type, icon etc.) per actitivy should be visible/hidden/visible on hover/hidden on hover
- Make the whole activity clickable (instead of only the title, the icon and the call to action
- Kanban board
- Section widths (for the section per page layout)
If you want to know more, have a look at our public roadmap: https://bdecent.de/designer-roadmap/ ... and add a feature request!
Give it a try!
- Head over to the plugins directory and get it: https://moodle.org/plugins/format_designer
- See it in action on our test site: https://labs.bdecent.de/course/view.php?id=5
- Create your own test course and play with it: https://labs.bdecent.de/local/kickstart_pro/createcourse.php?category=4
There's also a pro version which adds even more features!
Any questions, please let me know.
Hope you like it as much as we do!
Stefan on behalf of the whole bdecent team.
