Thomas Hanley

Hi Tim,

There is a semantic benefit though in clicking (I am trying to appeal to your inner geek here ; ).

Unless the typography and design (use of colour, negative space) are of a high quality what you end up with is one long amorphous chunk of content. Consequently there is a cognitive overhead in scrolling: you have to scan/read through all of this information looking for the specific unit of information that is important to you. On many instances people will not need to read every single unit. They will be looking for a specific chunk.

Using an accordion or tab mechanism adds structure and semantics to the information by chunking it. People can then rapidly scan the chunk titles/headers and then choose the chunk that is relevant to expand and focus on.

~thomas

Hi,

Just in case this info is useful to others in the same situation

• I am setting up a system using external database authentication.
• I am using Moodle 1.94
• I am not a database / tech expert ; )
  

I was thinking about this scenario:

What is to stop someone from editing their Moodle profile, logging out, logging back in and typing their new details (which will then fail as Moodle is referencing the external database).

I was wondering where you lock these fields. Looking here:

Administration ► Users ► Authentication ► External database

... there are settings only mentioning locking additional fields that have been mapped, but not locking the username and password fields.

Thanks to Sean at Pteppic for the following:

• Non-admin users cannnot change their username.
• However, they *can* change their password.
• But you can prevent that by editing the "Student" role so that the capability "Change own password" is set to prevent.
  

~thomas

Hi,

Moodle 1.94

All non-admin roles

They *can* change their password. But you can prevent that by editing the "Student" role so that the capability "Change own password" is set to prevent.

Hope this helps

~thomas

Hello Minh-Tam,

Thanks for your work on this. I definitely think that this is very useful functionality, particularly for reasons of usability. Showing users lots of information (including courses that are not current for them) creates an unneccessary cognitive overhead. So your change follows the well researched principle of progressive disclosure. Of course there is also an important aesthetic benefit too as the content area within the interface will look less cluttered : ) 

Allowing users to change the order is good as they can put courses into a sequence that is meaningful for them which is another usability benefit.

One usability question: Does clicking the + symbol show the course details? I guess it does but it might help to have a text label 'show course details' also. A significant number of people won't know what the + is for (or have to think about it). As Steve Krug's classic book on usability says 'Don't Make Me Think'!. If you look at interfaces such as Google who also use progressive disclosure they also use a + symbol but they reinforce with a text label, so that the functionality is immediately apparent:

  

~thomas

Hi,

Thanks for the useful info Ann. I am trying to style the login elements described above. Specifically I would like to put the Login and Logout pieces of text onto the line below the lines 'You are not logged in.' and 'You are logged in as: Name'.

However, both pieces of text appear as links within the div.logininfo. Neither of these links have ids so I don't think this is possible with CSS (I have just tried for several hours!).

I can't target them with CSS selectors because when the logout link is displayed it is the second <a> element within the div.logininfo.

In order to target them am I right in thinking someone will have to add ids into a PHP file somewhere?

Any info or help would be appreciated.

~thomas