Hi,
I've just upgraded to Moodle 4 and although I like many new things, I was surprised by the disappearance of the Move Right and Move Left actions for activities. We use them a lot to structure content within a section a bit better.
Have they disappeared for good? Any way for me to bring them back? If not, any other workaround?
Thanks a lot,
Jean-Philippe
Hi Nathan,
Thanks for chiming in!
Totally agree regarding “vertical bloat” as well. I've found some CSS to help reduce it in one of the forum posts, to be set using the theme_boost | scss setting:
.activity-item:not(.activityinline) { border: none; padding: 0.1rem; }
.activityiconcontainer { width: 20px; height: 20px; }
.activityiconcontainer .activityicon, .activityiconcontainer .icon { width: 16px; height: 16px; }
.activitytitle .text-uppercase { display: none; }
.description .course-description-item:first-child { margin-top: 0.25rem; padding-top: 0.25rem; }
.description .course-description-item:last-child { padding-bottom: 0.25rem; }
I sure wish getting back Move Right/Move Left was as easy as tweaking a setting…
I do hope we'll get it back soon; hoping for some more feedback here!
Cheers,
J.-P.
Really appreciate this helpful CSS - moodle 4.0 only seems to have brought limitations and neutralised the small tweaks I've used to structure the course more intuitively (including the move left/move right.
Here at Bucknell, we also use the "move right" feature as a way to group items together visually.
I do hope that capability is restored to 4.0.
Leslie Harris
Bucknell University
public function uses_indentation() {return false;
}And then the divs and styles so that activities indent.
No, you are not alone. That is a pretty important organization feature in my courses.
KSmith
Hi all,
I appreciate the thought and conversation occurring in this discussion and want to add some context to the decision to remove activity indentation from Moodle 4.0.
Some of this is discussed in MDL-72725, but worth bringing in here. We opted to remove the move right/left option for activities for a few reasons:
At the same time, we were aware that some will still want that extra flexibility. Which is why we left in the option for custom course formats to tap into the indentation functionality.
We would also love to explore different means of bringing hierarchy in a course and I'd appreciate any thoughts on that you may wish to share.
Thanks everybody for this discussion, especially Jean-Philippe for raising it.
But I wish like crazy that folders could contain not just files, but outright activities, which could then be disclosed or hidden right from the section page. I know this has some of the same specs as a collapsable section, but, once again, many of us need to be able to structure more within a section, and it would help reduce scroll of death as well.
Wouldn't the (optional and by default disabled) possibility of having course sub-sections (e.g. with a max number of sublevels) be a better solution in terms of UX?
Unfortunately, for many of us it is not possible to get plugins installed . To quote Jean-Philippe:
Keep in mind that in many institutions, the Moodle admin (…) is most of the time a technical staff member and not an expert educator or course designer. Thus, unfortunately, many times, potential (non-)modification decisions are unfortunately made more according to how easily maintainable the change is rather than how well it supports teaching and learning.
FYI: it was announced during last Developer Meeting that MoodleHQ will research on Course hierarchy (around 13:07 in the recording).
Hi Sander,
I am happy to hear there is UX research planned for it later this year, but does that also not mean that nothing will be changed in the upcoming 4.1 LTS release? Just a thought... for the mean time would it not be better to create this as a setting by example in Boost theme so for 4.1 LTS at least a site admin can decided to turn this on or off?
Gemma
HI Sander,
One thing to I would be concerned about is that recommending people to move fromhaving files resources listed on the course page, and moving them into a folder is they lose some key functionality.
The student can't see each file as being marked complete once they are downloading them (a project checklist)
The teacher cannot see if a student downloads a specific file anymore, and thus cannot intervene if the student has not read the workshop pre-reading a day before the workshop.
If a teacher runs weekly workshops and currently has the workshop pre-reading file on the course page, it can have individual completion tracking, and has an event log entry showing if they viewed it or not. Then the teacher can use one of the core reports to message anyone who has not yet viewed it a few days before the workshop to remind them to.
So compounding the lack of visual control, is a removal of oversight and ability to for the teacher to meaningfully intervene if the user is not preparing correctly.
There are other issues too where they maybe have a list of files, which some have access to all and then a group has their own files for a project for example. You would need a folder for all-students and then a folder per group due to restrict access limitations here as well.
So the move from a file resource being an activity to being a thing in an activity, loses
Would suggest that unless these are put in a folder at a file level that it is not a suitable replacement and should be recommended against.
My 2 cents.
Gavin
Thanks for posting this. For some reason, in our environment that was upgraded to Moodle 4 from 3.9.15+, the buttons carried over (see picture).
I was trying to figure out why they did not function until I found your forum post.
This is also a functionality we used very often- and would like to see returned, if possible.
I totally agree with you.
I have many teachers at my School complaining about the missed indentation. I'm the moodle admin and I don't know what to say, just "we have to wait to next developments".
I try to maintain updated my moodle to the latest version available every 2-3 weeks and after each update I allways check the move right option with no luck !
Please, please !!! fix it as soon as possible. We need that option !
Thank you.
Hi!
Just preparing for the new course (starts on september) and I found these annoying big resource blocks and the unability to move left/right.
I upvoted the "convert left/right blocks to bullet lists" solution in the tracker.
I would also ask why these giant blocks. If at least they used a BIG font size for the inner text/description...
The only solution I see is converting all resources to hidden resources and make a visible "tag" with a bulleted list of resources.
+1 to re-enable Move Right / Left in both Topics and Weekly course formats.
If you are concerned about over indentation, perhaps limiting it to just one or two levels might be a fair compromise?
Hello,
+1 to re-enable Move Right / Left in both Topics and Weekly course formats.
Right, it can be limited, but please put it back.
Without it it's a mess, and all courses must be rewrited totally,
Worst, for young students it's worse...
Thanks.
Hello,
+1 to re-enable Move Right / Left in both Topics and Weekly course formats.
Right, it can be limited, but please put it back.
Thanks.
Hello,
+1 to re-enable Move Right / Left in both Topics and Weekly course formats.
This option would be very helpful.
I realize this is where I should post my summary. Thank you for your recent posts. I felt the need to summarize the significant concerns raised by the Moodle Admin/Users community:
@MoodleHQ (I know Sander is leaving Moodle in the next few days, so hope someone picks this up) I feel the need to summarize the main concerns:
Lastly, this Tracker item is marked as "Development in Progress" but has not had activity recently. Can it get attention?
//I find showing all the activities in the index summary is way too confusing. This code changes it so to show only the section names!
.courseindex-chevron{display:none;}
.courseindex-item-content{display:none;}
//I added some margin so the activities remain centered while the section is full width. If you visit the website on narrow screens (I'm thinking smartphone) it does not add the margins.
@media (min-width:500px){
.activity{margin-left:20%; margin-right:20%;}
}
//this is more or less the code found above. It's more slim and readable
.activity-item:not(.activityinline) { border: none; border-top: 1px solid lightgray; padding: 0.1rem; }
.activitytitle .text-uppercase { display: none; }
.description .course-description-item:first-child { margin-top: 0.25rem; padding-top: 0.25rem; }
.description .course-description-item:last-child { padding-bottom: 0.25rem; }
.activityiconcontainer .activityicon, .activityiconcontainer .icon { width: 20px; height: 20px; }
Hope it helps!!
For reference I'm posting a before and after
After
But the ability to hide activities on side pane would be great. Or, at least, open side pane with all sections closed.
Regards,
José Moya
Spain
Hello,
I'm very much agree with this thread and the several that are similar talking about this topic.
Any news about this topic?
I'm on 3.11 waiting (like many admins in 3.8, 3.9 and 3.11) to be able to upgrade to the latest moodle 4.x version.
...But the impossibility of prioritizing or organize content without the option to move to the right or left, the file icon don't show the type (pdf, word, wmv, mpeg, avi) and the excessive vertical spacing are regressions that keep me out of date.
Thank you
I see that there is discussion about the intend function and the subsection option: with the intend function in a section you can create a visual "gestalt" overview/relation of the activities and resources in a section like a TOC in a book. Without intend you have to write down in an introduction text how the resources and activities belong together. (Small hint: users don't read text)
With subsection approaches you create for most users a "lost in hyperspace experience": by clicking on a subsection title they jump in a wormhole and have no clue how to go back to the higher level (we tested that and gave up this approach for that reason)
We are upgrading 3.11 > 4.1 this year, and the missing indent (and no better way to group activities/resources) was one of the main things the test group remarked on.
I look forward to the further development, until then I’m glad to be able to get back the indent 👍🏻
Actually, indentation from 3.11 has not returned in version 4.2.
Indentation in moodle 4.2 ONLY HAS ONE LEVEL.
Users do not ask for a 15-level indentation, but less than three levels...
I get the feeling that moodle programmers aren't teachers and with the 4.x releases in terms of UX, there has been a big step back in functionality and organization to a clean Apple-like interface...
Good question Peter!
After upgrading to 4.1.3 or 4.2, to get existing indentation back you need to go to the settings pages for Topics and Weekly formats (via Site admin > Plugins > Manage course formats) and tick 'Allow indentation on course page'.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
With such a long discussion thread plus a number of tracker issues, it's not easy to find out what has actually been done with regard to indentation in recent versions of Moodle. Thus, I'm just mentioning that in Moodle 4.2 onwards (also 4.1.3 and 4.0.8), you can now indent items one place to the right (or to the left for right-to-left languages) for courses in Topics or Weekly formats.
It's enabled by default in new sites, however for sites upgrading from earlier 4.0 or 4.1 versions it needs to be enabled by a site admin, as described in the doc Upgrading to 4.2.
After the site admin enables it, they have the option to reset indentation previously set (though only one level).
It's possible you could get one level of indentation back!
I just looked at a few sites: Wikipedia, Google help, Edge help, W3Schools, MoodleDocs and a few others. Indents are not used there. I now think that, in the majority of cases, the pages of a Moodle course could also be made without indentation.
For texts, the margins can be increased easily if needed, for example for a quote using <div style="margin-left:100px;"> which will create an indentation of about 1 in. To accentuate the indentation of a list, <ol style="margin-left:100px;"> does the trick.
In case non-text activities (file, folder, quiz, etc.) need to be indented, a small script can be used but this is not easy for everyone. Although indentations should be avoided as much as possible, they may be useful in some cases. And while I don't think I would use them anymore, Michael's suggestion to limit the identification to one or two levels also seems like a fair compromise to me.
