Thomas Hanley

Hi Alistair,

I agree with you. Moodle docs says "Meta courses inherit their enrollments, (and other role assignments(*), from these other course(s) instead of having students added manually".

I also thought that this was the wrong way around and thought that logically the meta course would be the course that other courses inherit from.

Of your two suggestions 'push' enrolmenent and 'pull enrolment' seem more user-friendly to me.

~thomas

Hi,

I absolutely agree with James and Joseph on this issue. As James wrote this 'scroll of death' is possibly the most significant usability problem with Moodle.

Oleg, my feeling for why this has not been implemented is not the same as yours. I feel that historically Moodle developers have lacked understanding of user experience and usability. The question for me is not whether developers think this feature is necessary, it is more a question of would this feature significantly improve the user experience within Moodle? I believe it would do. Of course the only way to establish whether this is true or not would be to carry out a usability test. NB this is not the same as suggesting if users wanted this they would request it through the Moodle forums.

Mary, thanks for the workaround tip. I believe also that other people use the book module to avoid the total cognitive overload of showing all course content in one go. I realise there is a mechanism for showing/hiding topics but it is not well designed and is itself a signficant usability problem.

From everything I have read about user experience my understanding is that if you have any significant amount of content it should be chunked and there should be sub-navigation by clicking on text or graphical labels/links. In effect this is what the book module does. It gives you a menu of links so that you can see the structure *without scrolling and experiencing cognitive overload*.

I will be trying out the above options in the next week and will feedback on what method I feel works best for users.

~thomas

Hi Mauno,

Thanks for all your thinking on improving this area of Moodle. Just a small contribution from me on the nbsp icon question!

I agree pretty much with Joseph that advanced users will figure out what this use is (tooltip will obviously help too for people who already know what a nbsp is).

I googled to see what icons other applications use. Almost all references were to Adobe Dreamweaver:

Only other example I could find was from Oracle:

The Dreamweaver example is similar to your example 1. So I would prefer example 1 or the Dreamweaver icon because at least people who are familiar with Dreamweaver or Oracle will (maybe!) recognise the icon. My logic though is somewhat undermined by the fact that I have used Dreamweaver alot in the past and I had no recollection of this icon! Also many people handcode so they won't be familiar with the icon either!

~thomas

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for the clarification. I guess this is what May also meant. Whereas I was complexifying things by imagining that you could directly access PHP variables from CSS.

~thomas

Hi Patrick,

2) Good to hear that the sideblocks will not break in Moodle 2.0.

3) With regard to the centre alignment of the blocks I would see two reason for changing the appearance:

• consistency (gestalt design principle), all of the other blocks seem to be left aligned
• with regard to the login box the text input fields look right aligned, the fields look squashed/condensed, users with long usernames will end up scrolling horizontally, plus all the negative space to the left looks disproportionate.

~thomas