Moodle plugins directory: Fordson

About Fordson

Fordson is a refreshingly clean and minimal design without skimping on visual cues that help learners.  Welcome and guide your students to the learning content with a straightforward homepage focused on getting engaged with learning and not the theme.  Fordson shines with a "less is more" approach but there are also many useful tools to help learners engage with your content such as improved customized navigation, Marketing Tiles and stunning display of courses.

Clean, Simple, Efficient

• Minimal design
• Single pane of focus for learning materials and blocks
• Customizable navigation: Nav Drawer, My Courses, Homepage Icon Bar
• Brand new folding navigation for teachers and students
• Out of the box a clean, refined, and stylish appearance with minimal configuration
  
• Built for all screen sizes
  
• Customized Homepage that has creative features when needed but can be used to create a minimal, focused, and distraction free homepage

Customize Navigation

Fordson integrates several key navigation enhancements to help get students engaged and learning quickly.  

• Customizable Homepage Icon Navigation Bar
• Course Management Panel for teachers to help manage courses
• Customizable Boost Nav Drawer
  
• This Course drop down to display grouped activities as well as grades, radial progress bar, teacher contacts, and course summary information
• My Courses drop down displays enrolled courses

New Innovative Course Management Panel for Teachers and A Super Cool Course Overview Panel for Students!

Special thanks to Richard Oelmann for integrating the Course Progress Radial for students on course pages.

The Teacher Course Management Panel features everything a teacher needs to see in order to edit and manage their course.  All the links are at their fingertips in an organized and easy to use sliding panel.

The Student Course Overview Panel shows student progress, grades, assignments, teacher contacts, a custom textbox for providing a message to students, and a course overview text.  This provides students with access to a quick snapshot of how they are doing in a course.

Purpose Driven Design

The elements that make Fordson unique are built by design and all serve a purpose.  Fordson attempts to streamline the process of going from the homepage to enrolling in a course so that learners can engage with the content quickly and efficiently.  The custom icon navigation bar is a very visual tool to direct authenticated users on your homepage.  If a user has permissions to create new course a button to do so appears on the homepage icon navigation bar.  DIsplay news and information in an intuitive textbox slider that is triggered by a button in the icon navigation bar but conveniently hidden to minimize distractions.  A unique textbox for both authenticated and non-authenticated users can provide all the necessary instructions for users.  

Significant changes to the layout move both learning content and blocks together to focus attention on a single pane on the screen.  Custom images uploaded by teachers provide visual cues for learners that they are in a different course and allow teachers to feel they can customize the visuals of their course. Utilize the color options and pick the exact colors you need to give Fordson your school colors.  

Easy Enrollment Add-On

Install the Easy Enrollment add-on and Fordson will display a new enrollment form on the homepage.  This new form will allow a student to enter a 6 digit code and instantly be enrolled into the corresponding course or group within the course. This allows a student to go from the homepage to a course in seconds!  It will even generate and read QR Codes for enrolling elementary kids by simple waving a paper in front of the computer.

Navigation

Fordson also provides unique navigation solutions with the ability to customize the Boost Nav Drawer.  Remove the default menu items and add in your own.  Jumping from course to course is much easier with the inclusion of the famous “My Courses” drop down menu.  Once inside a course, teachers will immediately notice the “Turn Editing On” button located prominently at the top right of the page.  Also inside a course page near the breadcrumbs a special drop down displays a grouped listing of all activities used within the course to quickly display a list of every quiz, assignment, or activity.  Unique to Fordson is a brand new "Course Management" panel for teachers.  This innovative navigation panel provides a much better way to display all the tools and links to manage a course in a convenient sliding panel.  The intent of the Course Management panel is to replace the "Edit Course Cog" drop-down menu.   

Theme Notes

1. In order to use the enhanced homepage you must make the SIte Home the default homepage for all users. It will not display if your homepage is set to Dashboard.
   
2. If upgrading from version 1.3.1 to 1.4.0 you will want to adjust the Header Image Height setting for Fordson.  This should be set to a minimum of 400px as a starting point for you to adjust the custom site and course background images.  The layout changes in 1.4.0 require a larger height to look nice since the image is put behind the content.
   

Special Thanks

Elements and certain functionality of Fordson would not be possible without the following users and plugins:

• Richard Oelmann  -Header Images & Social Icons, student course overview functionality - https://moodle.org/plugins/theme_waxed
  
• Mary Evans  - Morecandy (Sideway Header) Preset SCSS
  
• Jose Miguel Dager Montoya - Tiled Course Display on frontpage and course categories
  
• Alexander Bias - Navdrawer Remove Defaults - https://github.com/moodleuulm/moodle-local_boostnavigation
  
• Carlos Escobedo - Navdrawer Add Menu Items - https://github.com/cescobedo/moodle-local_navigation