Dear Moodle Devs and Community,
Here are the things I DON'T LIKE in the current Moodle 4 dev course navigation - working as a teacher + using the built-in default Boost theme inside Moodle 4.0dev+ (Build: 20220208) without customising anything (yet):
1) Course-index : No indication which course I'm in ! => Could the course's short name be placed right of the close course menu "x" mark? I need to know at a glance in which course I am, with multiple tabs / courses often being opened in my browser. Help !
2) More than that - I'm now forced to scroll up to the top of the course page to reach for the Participants, the Grades (and to see the course name there) - which previously all sat handily in Boost's left nav drawer.
At the top of a course page I now see only the site level links to My courses , Dashboard. These are nice, but I can't help thinking we could just push them into the User's menu top right ...
I strongly believe that on a course page the Course context should be plain and dominant. Could we for example have the course name and the course context links stick below the top bar as we scroll down ? Alternative : Bring all those items atop the new Course index ? Not exactly the same since the right and left side drawers now alternate, but the left nav is were they were before, and I believe that worked ?
3) Also I think the course name title - as it shows - is big and clear but do we need as much white space above it ..?
However - the links to Course, Settings, Participants etc. do NOT look prominent enough - Could this be because there are no accompanying graphics ? How else can we make them more visible?
The section headings look faint, as do the boundaries in between sections . Again, I believe visibility can and should be improved here for Boost. Yes, I can customise the CSS, but I think we should be talking here about Moodle working and appearing great out of the box.
Even MORE importantly - now the Teacher cannot even tell that their course is hidden when they use it - previously the greyed-out link in the breadcrumb was the indicator. Now what ? Please do consider adding a clear label somewhere like "Course hidden from students".
Speaking yet about breadcrumb nav, which does appear on activity pages - why are there no nodes for sections there ? This was useful info - a reminder of where in the overall course structure the opened activity / resource is contained (yes the course-index can show that now, but why can't we have both..? We won't always keep the course index open, not when we open the right blocks, for instance..)
6) While addressing the visibility of course information - I would plead here - since we care so much about the dates for
activities and can display them on the course page - why don't we display the start date (and end date if used) for the COURSE ? This would help the teachers a lot in maintaining control over these dates in the
course settings as well as help them appreciate and utilise the course filtering options effectively in the Timeline and Dashboard ? So many teachers are confused about the Past / Future / Ongoing courses distinctions, still.
7) Course index not behaving 100% consistently with all resource links - I believe all "File" links should always open - at least while the default "Automatic" setting is on? - onto the resource page with the File description and link. I've been writing more about this issue in another thread, and here's my latest report: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=424025#p1737669 .
8) This one has been mentioned earlier AFAIK and maybe is in the Tracker even - but the menu in the course-index should be collapsible / expandable in toto on-click . It also should NOT fold / unfold when we click on a section title rather than on its ">" handle.
Not sure this list is complete, probably not. as I've just started playing with Moodle 4. These are off-the-cuff remarks of mine, maybe a bit unfair at places, but I thought I would share them while perhaps there's still time for some improvements before Moodle 4 officially premieres. I like many of the new features and changes, but these aspects described above I just can't get to like... . Maybe these points have been mentioned earlier by others, too, but here and now I've put together my current "compendium" of wishes.
Thanks for any concern, and my kindest regards to All in the Team,
Przemek
PS. BTW - in
the currently operating versions of Moodle 3 I've always used
https://moodle.org/plugins/local_boostnavigation to further customise
the nav drawer and menus. I hope this or like tools will be possible to add also in Moodle 4.
