I think that now, with the introduction of the templates, is a good time to suggest and discuss possible improvements to the Moodle interface.
One of the nice paedagogical features of Moodle is its concept of activities. It is also really beneficial that all activities are on the same course page. The one thing that confuses lecturers here though is that Moodle treats resources as another kind of activity. Lecturers see those as two different things:
A resource is a resource that you can use in your activities, it is not an activity in itself. Similarly a label is not an activity. So I would perfer if these two disappeared from the activity menu.
Here is my proposal: there is enough space next to the current Add... menu to have separate Add activity and Add resource menus. I included an example of these two drop-down menus in this post but for some reason this editor deleted them. So I have attached a screenshot.
This also has three other advantages:
- the teacher can see the various types of resources that can be added already on the course page. This will avoid the many questions I get about "How can I link to a webpage" and similar.
- adding a resource becomes a one-step process. I find the current process with its two screens rather cumbersome.
- The "Add..." drop-down list becomes shorter.
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