Writing an activity that sequences other activities/resources

Writing an activity that sequences other activities/resources

by Nathaniel Titterton -
Number of replies: 3
I'm relatively new to moodle, having working closely with a home grown LCMS that we been using to teach higher ed programming courses. We are hoping moodle can help get us out of the LMS development world and let us focus on activity and curriculum design. That is, if we can get moodle to do what we want, we would love to scrap our code and move to moodle.

Our system is somewhat LAMS like, in that students work through sequences of activities. And perhaps SCORM like, although collaborative activities are a big part of our courses.

At any rate, sequences are key: a course is one big (500+ activity) sequence, that we break down around 25+ sessions that students are supposed to do in one sitting. A bigger session might have 30 separate activities, organized into a heirarchy. That is, there might be 4-5 activity groups each with 5-6 activities within a session.

We realize that we can get somewhat close to this behavior with a standard moodle, indenting resources/activities to get our session/topic/activity like heirarchy. Things would get unweildy for the students, given the size of the sequences, in the center frame of the course portal. And, unweildy for the instructor to manage so many activities.

The multi-step activites (I skimmed lesson and project) don't offer the range of activities that we want.

What I want to explore is making a new activity type called a "sequence", which is essentially a ordered list of moodle resources and activities. These resources and activities would be part of the course, but not listed on the center frame of the course portal. The sequence activity would be listed, however, and opening it would open a window where students could step through the activity sequence. (In our software, we also provide a jtree-like view of the sequence and other tools in the resulting window). Two advantages:
  1. By letting any moodle activity/resource be part of the ordered list, anyone's custom activity type can become part of a sequence.
  2. By letting other sequence activities be part of the ordered list, a sequence could be an arbitrary depth hierarchy, giving the students some structure as they move through the sequence.
Avoiding the issue of authoring right now, what sort of pitfalls can I expect with this approach? I don't have enough of a feel for the moodle architechture to know where they might be. My feel is that I shouldn't have too much trouble from the activities and resources themselves, since they are supposed to be modular. But, that I may have problem with the course portal itself.

(If you care, examples of our tool and courses can be found at spring07.ucwise.org -- use guest access)
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In reply to Nathaniel Titterton

Re: Writing an activity that sequences other activities/resources

by John Isner -
I visited your site as a guest. I really like your course design.

If you are interested in a possible third-party solution, take a look at this course. The Course Menu block gives a jtree-like view of all resources and activities. The blocks in the center column (which would be extremely long with 500+ activities) can be collapsed or even hidden from view, making the course menu the gateway to all activities. With a weekly course format, the menu folder labels will be weeks. I suppose css can be used to increase the width of the course menu or change its placement on the page.
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In reply to John Isner

Third party solutions mean the first party can focus on other things: that's great.

by Nathaniel Titterton -
Even with a sequence activity, I envision needing a block like your course menu, so that students can examine the titles of the "subactivities" without opening up the whole sequence.

When you refer to a "block" in the center column, is this the term for a single topic or week? (i.e., in your course, "introduction", "moodle features", or "graded activities"?). I'm afraid that the center column just won't give the students enough control over progress through the sequence -- for instance, forward/back buttons, searching backwards, etc. But, maybe that functionality can come through blocks (like the course menu block).

It looks like you guys are doing great stuff up at HSU. Are you familiar with other northern california universities (or nearby ones) that are pushing on moodle? I've heard rumors that several UC campuses are going to drop Sakai and go moodle soon.
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In reply to Nathaniel Titterton

Re: Third party solutions mean the first party can focus on other things: that's great.

by John Isner -
I wish I could take credit for it, but I'm not connected with HSU. However I have used quite a few of the blocks and modules which HSU has contributed back to the Moodle community. Course menu is one of their most popular.

I hope one of the UC people will answer your questions about what's going on at the other UC campuses.

The blocks in the "center column" are usually either numbered topics or dated weeks. Other course formats are available as third-party add-ons, and of course you can always create your own if you want to do some programming. Julian Ridden maintains a site that demonstrates many of the available course formats, both standard and third-party. You can see it here.

The HSU course I pointed you to is in topics format. The topics in the center column (which may not all have been visible when you looked) have exactly the same names and ordering as the folders in the course menu.
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