Moodle in English: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

We were demonstrating a Moodle course that we have for another Swedish authority that is working with Internet resources for schools. One impression they had was that Moodle was very linear. Part of the reason for that I believe is that when you get to the start page of any Moodle course that isn't VERY small, it will not fit in one screen. So it is only laid out for someone that wants to start from the beginning and work through it. = Linear. That Moodle lacks a general search tool doesn't help matters. (Hope that Google Summer Code suggestion gets implemented!)

When I started thinking about it, I also was reminded of my frustration with not being able to quickly CLICK, without scrolling, to a special part of a large course (Feature Demo).

Both these problems could be addressed with having the Topics be collapsible/expandable in the same way as the side blocks and have the default be collapsed, but that an inlogged persons state would be remebered. I don't know if anyone has something done or in the works on this question. I searched the forums for "compact" and didn't see anything that seemed connected with what I'm looking for. If there is something, please point me there! (A fellow on our web team seemed interested in looking at the code to see what could be done. But I don't know if/when he'll get the time. {At the moment i only know slightly more PHP than my grandmother ;-( , but I'm starting}

If I haven't explained clearly compare:
http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=5

with this:
A collapsed version of the page (mock)

PS: How can one get the spell-check function in Moodles RTF editor to include the words "Moodle Google PHP Javascript" or could I really be the only one that finds it irritating that these "strange" words are always marked??

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by N Hansen - Friday, 21 April 2006, 7:18 PM

The spell checker is integrated with Moodle, but isn't part of it.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Gavin McCullagh - Friday, 21 April 2006, 7:30 PM

Hi,

I guess I might add to this a problem we have with the "Show Only Topic N" boxes.

A large number of our users get very confused by this. They come in saying "I can't see notes" and it turns out that they are in this "show only topic N" mode. To be fair to them, the two boxes icon really doesn't adequately describe "click here to reveal other modules". This causes quite a few support calls. I exchanged the two boxes image for the word "ALL" sideways which sort of seemed to help a bit.

Perhaps there is an expand/collapse interface which can clear both of these issues up?

Gavin

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Anthony Borrow - Friday, 21 April 2006, 7:58 PM

I like the suggestion even though it seems to clutter the screen a little. One critique I have heard from folks is that the screen is "too busy". I have wanted to see the courses block include the +/- (collapse/expand) button for hidden courses so that students and teachers could access courses they were enrolled in last semester without having to see them all the time.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Joseph Rézeau - Friday, 21 April 2006, 8:24 PM

I agree with Jeff that the main page of any Moodle course can easily look cluttered.

The present system of boxes allowing for one course versus all to be displayed is too confusing, as has been pointed over and over again in the forums. Alongwith other Moodle teachers, I have totally disabled it in my customized theme in order to avoid confusing my students.

One way forward would be, as suggested by Jeff, "to make the Topics be collapsible/expandable in the same way as the side blocks are".

However, a better way would be to enable a hierarchical system within each Topic, similar to what exists in e.g. WebCT. Something like:

Topic 1- Getting started with Moodle
- How do I get the Moodle software?
- How do I install it?
- - What are the hardware requirements?
- - What are the software requirements?

etc. with each level collapsible/expandable.

That would be very neat. Of course, we would still have navigation problems with the (in)famous breadcrumb trail (there have been loads of discussions about this).

Joseph

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Miles Berry - Friday, 21 April 2006, 8:24 PM

I like the idea of the collapsable boxes as a way of hiding sections of the content. However, my own view has been that Moodle's in fact a very non-linear learning environment, with the ability for learners to select their own path through the resources and activities presented, and for teachers and learners to establish a rich network of connections between activites and resources via glossary, wiki and activity autolinking filters, even if courses are presented in a superficially linear format.
You might be interested in the discussion on topology over in the Technology and Pedagogy course.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Michael Penney - Friday, 21 April 2006, 9:59 PM

Two problems I have with this idea, one technical, and one pedagogical

1) Large courses with lots of resources take a very long time to load and render. Why in the heck should I have to load and then locate an entire course in order to respond to the forum in the 2nd week?

Leisurely exploration may be perfect for some courses, especially fully online courses that use rolling enrollment (so there are no set deadlines and students are free to learn at their own pace).

2) A second issue is that I feel there are different appropriate design techniques for different types of courses and different learners. This should be apparent from the number of modifications (time based activity hiding, conditional activities, hidden activities, alternative menuing systems, etc.) that folks have spent a good deal of time working on so they could use Moodle in environments where self paced picking from interlinked resources on a long scrolling page is not an ideal learning design.

As an example: inexperienced web site users still abound, and presenting them with too many choices at once overloads their working memory and leaves them confused and frustrated--by the interface, not the material. Not a good mental place for them to be trying to learn new material, especially as so many of them are on a tight time budget.

So frankly, I feel a bit shut out when folks say that Moodle's design due to it's pedagogical principles, as I work with many folks who feel they have their own ability to choose the best pedagogy and design for their subject area, the type of course, and their students, and feel that Moodle should be (and it certainly can be) flexible enough to implement it.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by N Hansen - Saturday, 22 April 2006, 1:44 AM

So frankly, I feel a bit shut out when folks say that Moodle's design due to it's pedagogical principles, as I work with many folks who feel they have their own ability to choose the best pedagogy and design for their subject area, the type of course, and their students, and feel that Moodle should be (and it certainly can be) flexible enough to implement it.

Here Here Michael. I'm sorry but I'm teaching a language using Moodle and if you don't learn the grammar for lesson 4 before the grammar before lesson 14 you aren't going to be able to understand lesson 14. So yes, my students proceed through the course in a linear fashion and that is the only way it will work. They may need to go back to earlier lessons, but they aren't going to be jumping around randomly.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Ger Tielemans - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 4:16 AM

So So N Hansen, now I understand why you always cut out chapter 14 before you gave the books with chapter 4 to your students.

Some students like to take a quick tour of a new course before they really start. I bet that you even teached them to do so (SQ3R, remember?)

I think that the problem with the screen is twofold:

People (wrongly) compare Moodle with normal glossy/fancy webpages. But the center of a Moodle homepage is just like the (boring?) TOC of a course book: the beauty is one level deeper on the content pages.
.
You can recognise beginning Moodle teachers by their habit to fill the sections with text and pictures before they learn to use the hyperlinks as oneliners, referring to pages with organised text, pictures and multimedia stuff.
.
More then once I also saw a beautiful outline in a section being killed by heavy use ("opleuken" in Dutch) of the label function. More then once I considered to remove the label function for that reason.
.
With the user in control and all these options for the user, the homepage must store more and more indicators(views) and handles(controls) for all these user-in-control-options: The simple handle for the brothers Wright turns into a real cockpit for your learning aeroplane... (you always can hide these options, like cutting pages out of books)
Installing The Humbolt additions - the second thing I do nowadays when I install a new Moodle - is another clever way to harmonise the growing complexity.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Chardelle Busch - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 4:45 AM

Oh sorry, duh.

Never mind my questions about the mouseover title.

It just needs to be changed to:

title="'.$thissection->summary.'

at two lines: 100 and 187. Although I don't think this works if you have div styles or other html in your summary.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Chardelle Busch - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 7:55 AM

Okay,
While Urs is probably fast asleep..., I've answered my question about having the header/navbar stay on top. You need to take line 98 from format.php and put it in your header.htm. So, mine looks like this:
<?php
echo '<a name="top" style="display:block;font-size:1px;line-height:1px;height:1px;"> </a>';
?>

<div id="page">

And now the page itself does not move.

Also, in case anyone is interested, I did a little bit of user testing and one good suggestion I got was to make the summary section titles look like links so the user knows to click on them. In my theme css I added this:

tr.section h3.summary a {
color: #my link color;
}
tr.section h3.summary a:hover {
color: #my link mouseover color;
}

Also, if you want to have the link mouseover pick up the "title" from the summary (like I mentioned above), be sure to add your section title to the summary with NO html. Then you can do whatever you want to for each section in your css stylesheet. E.g.:

tr#section-0 h3.summary {
border-bottom: 1px solid #79D2D2;
text-align:center;
font-size: 96%;

}

Have fun with this course format and give your courses a new "cool factor".

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by N Hansen - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 8:39 AM

I've got it running, except there seem to be theme issues. I notice there is something called "stretcher" in the code that seems to be some sort of class being applied to the page, but there is no "stretcher" anywhere in any of the theme files. As a result, it isn't stretching the content on my site but rather bunching it all up on the left side. Does anyone have any clue about this?

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 6:54 PM

Nicole, the "stretcher" div is the container element that is opened and closed when you click onto the toggle element h3. It does not have any CSS applied in Accordion.

Two questions:

Could it be that you did not copy the Accordion course format?
Did you try if the Accordion theme works in your Moodle installation?

I hope I could help you
Urs

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by N Hansen - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 8:23 PM

Urs-I copied the accordion course format. I can get the topics to work accordion style but it is the layout that is the problem. The topics take up only a small portion of the center on the left side and the remaining area in the center is just blank white space. I added the lines to my header and footer (including the correction pointed out by Chardelle with regards to replacing the chameleon line with accordion-I'm assuming it was a correct correction).

What I didn't copy was some of the files in the theme folder: the ui folder (because it seemed to be for chameleon only), config.php (I was afraid to overwrite my own), styles.php (I was afraid to overwrite my own), styles_layout.css (I was afraid to overwrite my own), and user_styles.css (had no clue what this was for). Please advise me if there is something in these files I need to cut and paste into my own theme.

I'm attaching a screenshot of the problem and will follow up with a screenshot of normal topic view.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by N Hansen - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 8:31 PM

Here's how that looks in topic view.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by James Ballard - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 9:45 PM

Hi

Try

#course-view .section table {
width:100%;
}

in your theme. We use pure white sections so this didn't effect us in the same way, but I did notice the course section editing icons were not appearing as they do elsewhere and this forced the right colum back out to the right.

Not sure if this the best way, or if it will work in your scenario.

Yours
James

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 10:01 PM

Nicole, the content area of the topics is in a table called "strechdtab".

Please try to add

div.stretcher table.stretchdtab {
  width: 100%;
}

to your CSS file.

I checked with short lines within a topic and the above change spreads the content over the whole width of the middle column as in the topics format. Does this CSS work for you too?

Urs

PS. I will check later which CSS properties are new and neccessary for Accordion.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by N Hansen - Friday, 28 April 2006, 2:20 AM

Are you sure it is spelled "stretchdtab" and not "stretchedtab"?

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Friday, 28 April 2006, 3:16 AM

Yes, Nicole, it is spelled "stretchdtab". Perhaps I should rethink the naming for the next version

Urs

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by N Hansen - Friday, 28 April 2006, 8:21 AM

div.stretcher seems to do the trick. There are a few other things about the appearance I am not entirely happy with, but I will work on figuring out what to do to make them look better.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Will Taylor - Friday, 28 April 2006, 9:22 AM

This work nicely for me. Am using accordion within a modified formal_white theme, this nicely expands the center section blocks to full-width when added to fw_layout.css .

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 6:23 PM

Chardelle, thanks for your great additions and comments.

In introduced a Version number in the README. This version is 0.3.
I moved the "anchor" form the course/format.php file into the header as you proposed.
Your CSS proposals are great. I did not add them to the Accordion theme in this version.
In the README I added descriptions how to add one entry into the lang file for the Accordion course format.
I also have rewritten the part about Accordion and Chameleon. You can use them separate but also together as I did in the Accordion theme.
The course formats in 1.6 are a bit different from 1.5. Accordion now comes with course formats for 1.5 and 1.6.

Urs

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 6:36 PM

Chardelle, using the summary text as title text is great.

A question for the developers: Does Moodle offer a function to strip all html tags from a text string? And probably it would be good to truncate the summary text to shorten the title. You never know what text the summary will contain.

Urs

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Michael Penney - Friday, 21 April 2006, 9:26 PM

You might light our Course Menu/Control Panel block, it provides a side menu with a collapsing/expanding menu system and an integrated Control Panel (so you don't need so many messy blocks).

Description

Download

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by A. T. Wyatt - Saturday, 22 April 2006, 12:14 AM

Hear, hear! This is a great block and does exactly as advertised. We think it is terrific!

atw

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Anuprita Kulkarni - Tuesday, 19 August 2008, 4:08 PM

Hi Michael ,
I downloaded the course menu module but i think its not serving my purpose of ..Can you suggest me something regarding the course list(categories and subcategories displayed on the front page) to be collapsible..

Thanks,
Anu

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Alan Trick - Tuesday, 19 August 2008, 9:32 PM

If you use the YUI menu you can disable that outline so it doesn't appear at all; however, at the moment you can't collapse it. If you really need it, I might be able to add that feature.

Disclamer: I'm the primary author of the YUI menu.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Michael Penney - Tuesday, 19 August 2008, 10:11 PM

Hi Anuprita, we've incorporated many of the ideas learned in the course menu and other navigation work we've done into a new course format called 'flexpage'.

You can see an example here:
http://ciscoinstitute.net/course/view.php?id=76

Cisco's course is about 50 pages worth of content if displayed in topics format. Flexpage, it is presented one page at a time, with tabs, drop down menus, etc.

You can download it from the modules and plug-ins page, or from here:
http://www.moodlerooms.com/intel.html

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Anuprita Kulkarni - Wednesday, 20 August 2008, 1:22 PM

Hay Thanks Michael..I hope it solves my problem...
Thanks,
Anu

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by sam marshall - Friday, 21 April 2006, 11:14 PM

Mmm. We've turned off the 'show only one week/topic' feature on our site because it would seriously confuse students (frankly, I think it's a horrific piece of UI and should be scrapped globally, but)... but I agree there can be a bit of an issue about having too much stuff displayed.

I think your expandable topics idea sounds pretty good for topic view but not so good for our study calendar view or the inbuilt weekly one (they're similar). Basically the problem is that supposing we only show the current week, well obviously that's useless because if you weren't around and there was an activity last week, you'll have missed it unless you specifically know it was there. Opening it up to show 3 weeks around current would be better, but again, what if the student's been busy and hasn't logged in for a fortnight?

So in summary, yes I think it would be good if your idea was used to replace the 'show only one thing' feature for topics view, but it shouldn't be implemented for weekly-type views.

For those, I would consider something like a 'show N weeks around current' view (with that being what you get on the default course page, and a link to another page that shows all weeks). But in addition I'd want to track whether each user has done/viewed a particular activity, so that activities in the past which you haven't done and might not know about can always appear, in an 'Activities You May Have Missed' area.

This is a little like some of what I've heard suggested around learning design - although I might as well also say that I think that forcibly hiding things from students is not a good way to address the clutter problem, and I think an 'intelligent adviser' approach where the system features 'What should I study next?' in an easy-to-access manner but actually lets you choose anything, would be preferable to making links actually vanish and appear depending on conditions. So anyway, uh, what this paragraph was supposed to suggest is that maybe the LD features will also help address this issue.

--sam

PS This is entirely my random thoughts, I don't think the OU plans any development in this area particularly.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Miles Berry - Saturday, 22 April 2006, 1:31 AM

I like the 'intelligent adviser' idea. I wonder if something could also be done using social tagging, or (blue skies here) something similar to Amazon's recommendation system - you know: learners who scored similarly to you / contributed to this wiki / used this resource, also found these activites and resources useful...(qv Tom Hoffman)

I'm also interested in the notion of mirroring the non-linear navigation through a Moodle course more closely via the interface: I'm thinking here of something like Drew Buddie & Ian Usher's game style interface we saw at last year's UK Moot, or something like a mindmap/concept map - it would be easy enough to link to Moodle activities and resources from either, but building an interface like that automatically from a course, or constructing a course through such an interface, would be way cool, don't you think?

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Darren Smith - Saturday, 22 April 2006, 2:07 AM

Stimulating post as ever, Miles. I love the recommended activities idea and a mindmap course format would be beyond cool! A superb ideas for Moodle.

Darren

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Chardelle Busch - Saturday, 22 April 2006, 5:49 AM

Thanks for reminding me about Jan's code, Darren, I'm hoping he'll post it. I also like the idea of collapsible sections. So much, in fact, that I tried to do it (but wasn't successful). As a workaround, I have a two-column course format with basically no middle column just two columns of blocks with section 0 moved to the top of the left column. See screenshot.

Although the "show only topic 1" idea is a good one, in reality it just isn't very usable. I would love to see more course formats developed.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Darren Smith - Saturday, 22 April 2006, 5:30 PM

I did contact Jan off-list and he is still working on it as there are 1 or 2 more things he needs to do. I can see most of my courses using that format when it is released.

Moving section 0 is interesting. Is your course format available?

Darren

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by N Hansen - Saturday, 22 April 2006, 7:37 PM

Did he tell you whether it will be for 1.5 or 1.6 or both? I'm anxious for it too. My hieroglyphs course right now only has 10 topics in it, but once it all is available to students it will be 26 topics each with about 6 or 7 activities in it-having just one visible at a time would be wonderful.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Darren Smith - Saturday, 22 April 2006, 8:12 PM

I didn't ask shy

Darren

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Jan Dierckx - Saturday, 22 April 2006, 8:38 PM

The demo site is using Moodle 1.5.3 Up to now it seemed to work in my test installation (1.6) as well, but I haven't done any serious testing with UTF-8. When Darren asked here in the forums about something similar, I took out some bugs and I converted the hardcoded Dutch to proper language strings and then ...
I got (too) courageous and started adding javascript to allow people to reload a separate topic without having to reload the page.
Stupid me didn't save the intermediate version (proper language strings, but no fancy javascript stuff)... I will try to get it working again, but I can't promise you anything.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Chardelle Busch - Sunday, 23 April 2006, 2:06 AM

Hi Darren,

Here it is if you want to try it. Just drop the blocks folder into the Course/format folder. Unless you add a name to your lang file, the choice in course settings will be: formatblocks. This will essentially give you a 2-column page with section 0 at the top of the left column, then blocks in both columns. If you want a "section" with activities, add the side bar block (the same as my section block (used to be course menu) but it has a better GUI config file). Then move it to the left column. This essentially gives you collapsible sections. Since my site is all two-column pages, I haven't tried making this into the typical 3-column page, so if you want three columns, I'm not sure how that would work.

blocks.zip

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Ger Tielemans - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 4:46 AM

With the current Freemind filter for Moodle (see the forums) you already can do this in the current moodlë:

create a mindmap view on your course in Freemind ...free as in freemind
insert the url's of the coursepages in this map
export the map to Moodle, you have several choices:
1. insert it as mindmap in the HTML-editor (best choice)
2. insert it as a collapsable javascript page (if you use anoterh VLE
3. insert it as a HTML-page (in two flavors, on a flat limited website?)

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Miles Berry - Monday, 1 May 2006, 5:50 PM

Ger, Thank you so much for this heads up. For others interested, the discussion's over at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=31468

I've also discovered a Flash Browser for freemind files which would get round many of the problems associated with java, and have even had a go at creating a mindmap of Using Moodle as an example, although I can't get it to embed properly via the Flash Filter, not that this would be an issue in our own course, where I can use <object> tags.

I've attached the mindmap itself, as the Freemind format looks relatively transparent and something that it would be possible to generate from Moodle's database in much the same way as the course page gets generated, thus potentially, producing a concept map interface for Moodle courses on the fly, although I don't have the time or expertise to write this!

I put together a few slides on learning topology and visual representations of online learning for a Mirandanet presentation I did on Saturday - there's a 3MB pdf available for anyone interested, but they probably don't work too well without at least some commentary - I've posted a brief summary over in my blog.

index.mm

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Darren Smith - Friday, 21 April 2006, 11:21 PM

I have thought (and possibly posted) collapsable weeks but believe I have found a better solution to long / linear topic courses. Basically it is similar to Micheal's block but is part of a course format and only tries to solve the navigation issue and doesn't have activities and the like in the menu.

See this thread http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=42088 and an example here http://www.olvrode.be/course/view.php?id=8.

Darren

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by John Anderson - Saturday, 22 April 2006, 7:12 AM

After looking at regular CMSs (Drupal Mambo..) I come to the conclusion that the different 'starter' page look from the rest of Moodle's bread crumb navigation flies in the face of some pretty basic web design principles, like:

Consistent, predictable navigation
A consistent layout throughout the site

I'll say the modules, blocks and community are unbeatable though!

John A

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Matt Gibson - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 6:53 PM

I agree competely. It would be far better IMO to be able to choose to have activities open in a window with all the same course blocks and maybe the topic section too. Alternatively, I did think of having all activities in pop-ups, so that the main course remains visible underneath, but was surprised to find it impossible to do this as it only works for resources. Anyone know the logic behind this, or of any hack(s) to make it possible?

Matt

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A possible solution to avoid "Endless" Moodle

by Josep M. Fontana - Saturday, 22 April 2006, 10:55 PM

I agree with you Jeff. That was my first impression when I first saw Moodle. Later, I've become used to it but I can see how other people might find it hard to get used to it.

I like the organization by topics, personally, but instead of (or besides) making them collapsible, I think a better solution would be to be able to embed other pages similar to the main course pages (i.e. with the same basic look and functionalities) under links within a given topic.

So, for instance, imagine you have a topic block named 'Week 3' or 'team work' or whatever. Within this block you have a few resources (e.g. some text or html document with instructions), plus a forum plus whatever else you want. Then imagine that you can have a link inside this block with a name such as 'activities for Week 3' or 'team activities' which, when clicked on, takes you to a page with a number of blocks where you have different activities, e.g. 'Quizzes for Week 3', 'wikis to do X', etc. Or another link that is named 'forums' and it takes you to a page with a number of forums organized tematically. Since in my proposal the embedded pages would have basically the same structure and functionalities as the main course page, you could organize these embedded pages with whichever combinations of resources and activities you wanted.

I think this could help to reduce the "length" of the course pages considerably besides making the organization of courses more efficient and flexible.

I guess one could achieve this same effect by creating a metacourse and making all those links take you to daughter courses, but I think that is too cumbersome. I don't see why one couldn't do this within the same course.

Josep M.

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Re: A possible solution to avoid "Endless" Moodle

by Ger Tielemans - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 4:57 AM

Before the blocks came up I used and trimmed in several ways the modul SUBSECTION (see the forums) just for the reason you describe, but It did not make things more clear:

hiding structure for students turned Moodle into a student-maze, the same feeling you develop in a complex lesson or a complex scorm script (without a TOC/course-map for orientation)
So in the end I went back to the Moodle homepage with the clear outlines in the sections in the middle and the additional block activities...
my 5 cents

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Steve Hyndman - Sunday, 23 April 2006, 1:16 AM

I've completely disabled collapse topics on most of my Moodle sites to prevent confusion, but long courses with lots of topics do present a problem.

One workaround I'm experimenting with on a training site I'm developing is to simply use hyperlinks to the topics in the Introduction topic and in an html block. I haven't thoroughly tested this and haven't tried it with an active class yet, but it does seem like a simple solution to this problem...at least for my purposes.

If I don't run across some unexpected problems with this method as I test it more, then I plan to enable the collapse topics feature on my teaching sites this summer and use this hyperlinking method in my college classes...most of which have around 15 topics.

I've opened one of my training modules to visitors so you can see what I'm doing. Let me know if you have any feedback on this. See the link below.

http://www.kentuckyclassroom.com/ksba/course/view.php?id=3

Steve

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Darren Smith - Sunday, 23 April 2006, 4:47 AM

This is what I was trying which lead me to the course format. The main difference is I wanted to get rid of section 0 appearing all of the time above the other topics (which I managed by hacking the course format) but couldn't call section 0 back again as a hyperlink with topic=0 shows the whole course and not section 0.

Anyone know a solution?

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Steve Hyndman - Sunday, 23 April 2006, 6:18 AM

Darren,

Couldn't you just leave section 0 empty? You would have a small area there at the top, but if you just don't include anything in it, then it seems you would be able to do what you want.

Steve

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Darren Smith - Monday, 24 April 2006, 3:06 AM

True but I do like having a misc section which outlines the course (but the students don't need to see this all of the time).

Have you got your course being accessed automatically collapsed or does it only collapse when a student clicks on the HTML link?

Darren

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Steve Hyndman - Monday, 24 April 2006, 4:24 AM

It works like normal. I have the course set originally to show all topics, but when a student collapses topics, then their settings are remembered the next time they log in. By doing it this way, I haven't changed any code...I'm just using hyperlinks to make sure students don't get lost if they collapse topics.

For what you are wanting to do, you may consider either leaving the topic section blank and using section 1 for your course outline...or even use section 0 for navigation links so they will always be on top.

Steve

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Josep M. Fontana - Sunday, 23 April 2006, 6:53 AM

Steve, I see that you use the block course menu from HSU. How did you get rid of the folder icons? They are nice but they take up too much space. I like your implementation and I'd like to do it myself.

Josep M.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Steve Hyndman - Sunday, 23 April 2006, 8:12 AM

Josep,

I do like HSU's block course menu, but I'm not using it here. The block on the left is just an html block with hyperlinks.

Steve

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Josep M. Fontana - Monday, 24 April 2006, 2:42 AM

Hi Steve,

OK, that is pretty useful to know and it is a use of the html block I had not thought about. Thanks.

Josep M.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Tuesday, 25 April 2006, 5:08 AM

Hi,

Accordion is a visual approach to reduce information on the Moodle course page. Modern web techniques allow behaviours to support e-learning needs and support nice design.

A new course format and the same "prototype" library with JavaScript behaviours as in the gallery and the "Drag ..." course on the Chameleon site bring live on teh course page. The behaviour works without the need to patch Moodle. I added cookie handling to that library. You return to your last open state when you leave and return to the course page.

Have fun folding through the topics of that course.

Urs

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Darren Smith - Tuesday, 25 April 2006, 5:42 AM

Nice

I couldn't readily see any download information. Are these going to be downloadable as third party hacks or are the likely to appear in the core?

Darren

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Wednesday, 26 April 2006, 6:01 AM

Darren and all,

in the Accordion course you can download the files as an archive from the explanation block on the left side.

Included are the Accordion course format and theme with the JS library. The README in the theme folder gives some hints how you can integrate the Accordion engine in your own theme.

Urs

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by James Ballard - Wednesday, 26 April 2006, 5:14 PM

Hi

I downloaded the Accordion format, which is great for some of our pages - thanks for making it available.

It is working fine as far as I can tell; we're currently in the process of integrating with our theme. However, when I edit the summaries or enter the course settings I get a bombardment of ERROR [createSelect]: Can't find the requested dropdown definition messages. They don't seem to affect functionality but we would obviously like to remove them. I have screen dumped the error messages in succession and attached the file.

Any ideas where I've gone wrong?

Yours
James

PS (edit): had to zip the gif file so it didn't display on screen and cause unnecessary scrolling on the page.

accordion-errors.zip

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Wednesday, 26 April 2006, 8:51 PM

James, great that you are interested in Accordion and thank you for your feedback. Sorry for this bug. The HTMLeditor has problems when the prototype library is loaded on the same page. I always turn the HTMLeditor off so I did not notice this bug.

For now I added a condition to make the libraries only load on course pages to avoid the conflict. I suppose Accordion works now. I updated file on the Chameleon site.

When I looked at the code of the edit page I noticed, that the JavaScript code for these HTMLeditor menus which are producing the errors you reported is placed after the closing html tag. This is very strange and should not be. Probably it is the reason for the conflict with the prototype library? I opened Bug #5347 - JS code after page end???

Urs

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Wednesday, 26 April 2006, 11:02 PM

I corrected the bug in course/edit.php. It was not the reason for the incompatibility

Urs

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by James Ballard - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 4:19 PM

Thanks Urs,

Managed to get Accordion integrated excellently within our theme, and it was easy to implement.

Good and bad news with the error. Good that it's only a minor annoyance that will not affect users in our current application. Bad that it would prevent us using this in a wider context and there wasn't a quick fix sad

.

Thanks again for a great alternative format,
James

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Art Lader - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 1:54 AM

Is the Accordian format for 1.6 only?

-- Art

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 2:35 AM

Not at all. Why do you ask?

The Chameleon site is Moodle 5.x only.

Urs

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Art Lader - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 2:53 AM

I want to install it, but I wasn't sure.

So I will just unzip it and put it in with all the other themes, right?

Thanks, Urs.

-- Art

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Chardelle Busch - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 4:03 AM

Hi Urs,

I've installed this in 1.6, and added the acco file to my theme with the necessary changes and all is well except for the html editor notices. Would you please let us know if you find a fix for this?

By the way, in your readme file you have:

<?php include('ui/chameleon.php'); ?>

Which I assume should be:

<?php include('acco/accordion.php'); ?>

Also, when you click on the topic summary, that topic goes to the top of the page
thereby essentially "hiding" the header and the nav bar and making users have to scroll up to see the nav bar.

I deleted the #top from the href:
echo '<a href>'.format_text($thissection->summary, FORMAT_HTML, $summaryformatoptions).'</a>';

Is this going to mess anything up?

Also, I thought it would be nice if the mouseover (title) was the section summary instead of "section1". I changed it to this:
title="section'.$thissection->summary.
Except now it shows: "sectionMy Section Summary"
Any ideas on how to get rid of "section" in front of the summary?

Thanks

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Ger Tielemans - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 5:08 AM

Yes I like this solution: it keeps the homepage as organiser and still offers the modern, less crowded look. Nice, I hope that it becomes a working theme for 1.6: I prdict that when we change the colors, we will use this format for our schools!

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 6:59 PM

Ger, Accordion version 0.3 you can install in Moodle 1.6.

The Accordion theme is not meant as a production theme. I use it for demonstrating the Accordion course format only. There are many areas in the theme which must be optimized or even corrected.

If you are interested in a Moodle theme similar like this with other colors please let me know.

Urs

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Re: Accordion

by Will Taylor - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 2:37 PM

This is an awesome course format - I'm having a great time playing with it!

I've also installed this under Moodle 1.6, and am having trouble with the html editor notices (which appear as well when I go to Settings, I assume due to the editor in the Summary field there). Fixed if I disable the text editor - but I do like my editor.

I also receive a "A required parameter (sesskey) was missing" error on returning to the course page from Settings, which I can work around by exiting this error page with the "turn editing on/off" button instead of "continue" (which bounces me back to the front page of the site). Any insight into this?

Thanks for your contributions to Moodle.

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Re: Accordion

by Urs Hunkler - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 6:31 PM

Will, thanks for your feedback.

Course formats have changed for 1.6. I added the course format for Moodle 1.6 to Accordion v 0.3.

For other changes please read my other posting or the README.

Urs

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 6:40 PM

Art, the Accordion theme goes into your theme folder. Please copy the Accordion course format into your course/format folder. You also find a short description in the README file in the theme folder. Please try also Version 3.0.

Read about the changes.

Thanks
Urs

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Bernhard Hiegl - Tuesday, 25 April 2006, 5:55 AM

Hi Urs,

these effects have an enormous impact on the overall feeling of the user and I would be totally happy with it but(!) what about if JavaScript is disabled. Are there any modifications possible and planned to make it usable without the accordion effect?

Thanks, Bernhard

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Chardelle Busch - Tuesday, 25 April 2006, 6:03 AM

Way cool as usual Urs. This is probably the best answer yet for a better course homepage interface. It is similar to but much better, of course, than my crazy blocks format. Are you going to make this course format available?

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Wednesday, 26 April 2006, 6:09 AM

Hi Bernhard,

@"these effects have an enormous impact on the overall feeling of the user ..."

That's why I like these interfaces with fast response and attractive look and feel so much.

@"but(!) what about if JavaScript is disabled."

When JS is disabled the topics will not be collapsed and the course list looks similar to the normal Moodle course. Could I answer your question this way or did you mean something else?

Urs

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Bernhard Hiegl - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 1:34 AM

Sorry Urs, my fault!
What i did was disabling JavaScript after having clicked the accordion several times. This left me in the middle of nowhere. I realized that after a complete page reload everything is fine. Disabling JavaScript in the middle of the session is of course not what you should care about.
Great work and btw. this seems to be the beginning of "Web 2.0" with Moodle!

Thanks, Bernhard

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Josep M. Fontana - Tuesday, 25 April 2006, 6:00 AM

Accordion is VERY nice but I still think that it would be really worth it to allow embedding of course pages within other course pages. That would give you a lot more flexibility and possibilities. I think that is perfectly compatible with an accordion like interface.

Josep M.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Art Lader - Tuesday, 25 April 2006, 6:17 AM

That is so cool!!!! I want that!!!

-- Art

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by N Hansen - Tuesday, 25 April 2006, 8:43 AM

How long is the cookie stored that returns the student to the same state?

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Wednesday, 26 April 2006, 5:57 AM

Nicole, the cookie is stored for one year.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Martin Dougiamas - Tuesday, 25 April 2006, 3:13 PM

This collapsible idea is similar to how I started out designing the current "zoom" function, but the problem with this approach is with a very long course (say, 52 weeks) you can have 50 "title bars" showing above the current week, which forces you to scroll down a lot all the time. Plus you need to load/process the entire 52-week listing every time even though you're only interested in a small part of it.

That's why only one is shown currently and there is a jump menu under it.

I do like the nifty folding effect though, Urs, it's fun!

And I like this thread, keep thinking guys! We need good solutions here.

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Multilevel course: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Josep M. Fontana - Tuesday, 25 April 2006, 6:24 PM

Just a few more details on how the system I outlined in my previous posting (http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=44265&parent=203295) could work.

Imagine that besides all the options available now, the teacher of the course has one more option either in the 'resources' or 'activities' menu (I don't know which one would be better for this from a conceptual point of view). The option could be something like 'course sub-page'. When the teacher creates this subpage, after filling in all the relevant information, instead of being directed to an activity that she must construct, s/he gets directed to a new, blank course page (which would be a sub-page of the main course page) with the exact same options as the main course page. There she proceeds to create resources and activities in the normal way. I think it would be useful to allow at multiple levels of embedding so that within this sub-page, she could choose to create new sub-pages.

This could radically decrease the length of the main course page as well as that of the different sub-pages. Depending on the needs and the quantity of resources/materials, one could choose between having the main course page be formed exclussively by links leading to course sub-pages or a mixture between resources, activities and links to course sub-pages. Of course, one could also choose to leave things as they are now by not using the option to create a course sub-page.

The possibilities to organize our courses with this scheme, I think, would be greately improved. The problem with the "endless" course pages mentioned at the beginning of this thread could be easily avoided.

Can anybody comment on this idea from a more technical point of view? Is this something that would bee too difficult to implement? I don't really see why. This structure replicates a type of structure that is very standard in many web sites. The only difference is that in these sites we usually have access only to content whereas in Moodle we would have access to the different Moodle modules as well in the different course levels.

What are the disadvantages that you people see with this system? Because, frankly, I can only see advantages.

Josep M.

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Re: Multilevel course: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by N Hansen - Tuesday, 25 April 2006, 7:33 PM

Josep-I like your idea, I think it would be nice if this were implemented in conjunction with replacing the activity type in the breadcrumbs with the subpage. But because of the breadcrumbs, creating this format would require finally dealing with the breacrumb problem, which would be pretty extensive from what I understand because breadcrumbs are scattered all over in different modules and not centralized in one place. Perhaps it is time this problem was tackled.

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Re: Multilevel course: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Josep M. Fontana - Tuesday, 25 April 2006, 8:16 PM

Hi Nicole. Yes, this would would have implications for the breadcrumbs. But, hey, as you say, if you can solve two "problems" in one go, so much the better

Josep M.

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Re: Multilevel course: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by N Hansen - Wednesday, 26 April 2006, 12:09 AM

That gets me thinking, perhaps the breadcrumb trail should be part of course formats, and that could be one aspect that sets one course format apart from another, its breadcrumb trail. That could lead to different trails across a site if it has different formats in different courses but I think that it is important that the breadcrumb trail reflect the format chosen by the teacher, not one that in no way reflects the format-as it is now for most courses, being based on activity types.

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Re: Multilevel course: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Darren Smith - Wednesday, 26 April 2006, 1:45 AM

Even better idea IMHO - the navigation bar (

) format should be chosen by the user in their profile and not the teacher then we can all be happy on the same site

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by N Hansen - Tuesday, 25 April 2006, 7:30 PM

Martin-I think the title bars in his course were rather large-and probably could be shrunk to a small size to take up less room with a smaller font size. Also, each of his topics had a huge amount of content in them, which forces more scrolling to see other topics-I know in the course I would like to use this in the topics are much shorter and this wouldn't be such a problem. Since Urs' solution would work for some courses so I wouldn't dismiss the idea. I think having a variety of formats available is best, then people can choose what is most appropriate for their situation.

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Urs Hunkler - Wednesday, 26 April 2006, 6:24 AM

Martin, this Accordion course format will surely not fit for every course and is not proposed to replace the topics format

Until now I never used or even saw a course with 52 weeks. I think this amount of information is overwhelming by it's mere existence.

For smaller courses Accordion looks very promising to me and I like the experience to skim through the topics like changing pages in a book one after another.

And I feel certain that these kinds of experiences with VLEs will support learning through positive emotions.

@"I do like the nifty folding effect though, Urs, it's fun!"

It's my slogan: "Successful Learning with Fun"

Urs

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Re: "Endless" Moodle gives bad impression

by Ger Tielemans - Thursday, 27 April 2006, 5:20 AM

52 weeks is too much to keep overview anyway. As you know we cut the academic year in four periodes, each with a maximum of 12 weeks. We had to adopt Moodle to be able to show the user only the weeks of the current period and still give him access to courses of previous periods. (this is not possible with the close the eye option.) You can see it working on the CD I gave to you last year

Would be more elegant to have the option to make a set of 4 (or 6) courses that cover the complete academic year, making it possible to show only the weeks of the current period and still having access to the weeks of other periods.

I think that could be easily realised in a course of 52 weeks, by giving each section a show/hide flag and offering the teacher/user a table where he can fill buttons with different views on the sections by checkmarking the weeks ..and these buttons appear in the right part of the navigation bar:

button for show only current week
button for showing only current period (admin sets the periods like on our CD?)
button for show all
button for show only the weeks until this week
etc..

Theachers can choose which buttons to offer, student can choose his prefered current view.

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