User experience (UX)

Returning learners forgetting My courses tab exists

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:40:48 GMT

by Mary Cooch (personal account).

Would it help to add the Course overview block to the default dashboard (Site admin > Appearance} and reset the dashboard for all users? That said, I like Shirley's suggestion

Returning learners forgetting My courses tab exists

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 03:16:20 GMT

by Teresa Watts.

Hi Natalia, I'd really like to hear more about this issue - I've sent you a message to line up a call

Update on the Moodle Design System

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:50:12 GMT

by Zoe Rippon.

Hi Eduardo,

Thank you for your questions and for engaging on the topic.

Hopefully I can provide another perspective in response to your question.

Will the tokens help only with new and well-structured components?

Or is there also a plan to improve Moodle’s existing foundation, where today a lot of customisation still depends on specific SCSS, fragile selectors, and plugin-by-plugin adjustments?

The answer is evolving, however what I can say is this.

Moodle HQ will begin to use the tokens for any new development effort from now on, meaning that the tokens will be in core Moodle LMS in the places that are being worked on by the teams. This could be for new features or replacing hard coded values in places developers might come across them if they are working on improvements or updates to other things.

So yes, they will help in those places they have been applied.

To answer the question around improving the existing foundation, I can’t speak to the broader technical detail however when it comes to the tokens work there have been discussions about how HQ can most effectively switch over to these tokens sooner than the incremental approach we are taking now. We can potentially do this much faster/more efficiently than we may have been able to in the past leveraging AI. This is something the platform team are talking about and will continue to investigate.

I hope this has helped to answer your question, however if you would like to discuss this any more we would love to welcome you along to the next Design System Product Advisory Group (PAG) meeting where we share more about the work in progress and have plenty of time for questions at the end. You can sign up here.

Thanks again,

Zoe

Update on the Moodle Design System

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:49:58 GMT

by Eduardo Kraus.

Hi, Mathew.

Thank you for the reply, but I still think it is all too generic, and it feels like everything written about tokens came out of ChatGPT.

Today, most child themes already create their own "$h2-font-size" values for colors and other variables within the theme ecosystem itself. So the real question is whether tokens will actually make this kind of day-to-day customization easier, or whether they will just rename the layer we are overriding. We already know the Bootstrap items, and now will we just have other names?

Because, in theory, it sounds great to talk about "semantic override", "intention instead of implementation", and "stable contract", but in practice what we need to know is how this will work inside real Moodle, with plugins, child themes, and many parts of core that still do not follow a consistent standard, and how this would help, for example, in plugins such as mod_feedback, which practically do not have a single useful class="" in the HTML output. In those cases, the problem is not just color, typography, or spacing tokens. The problem is structural, due to the lack of standardization in the markup so that the theme can act in a clean and predictable way.

So, for those who develop child themes, the question remains very straightforward:

Will the tokens help only with new and well-structured components?

Or is there also a plan to improve Moodle’s existing foundation, where today a lot of customization still depends on specific SCSS, fragile selectors, and plugin-by-plugin adjustments?

Because, honestly, the biggest gain for those who maintain themes would not just be having nicer names for variables, but actually reducing the real fragility of customizations in core and plugins.

The initiative is good, but I think it still needs to move from concepts to concrete examples of how this will work in Moodle as it exists today.

Eduardo Kraus

Translated using ChatGPT

Activity and Resource Icons Turn Black

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:40:27 GMT

by David Mangez.

Hi @Sandipa
I can't share you my site, but I can certify you that I'm encoutering this issue in the Moodle sandbox.
Do you think I should publish a ticket in the Moodle Tracker ?

King regards

Update on the Moodle Design System

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 06:39:05 GMT

by Mathew May 🇳🇿.

Kia ora Eduardo,

Great question, and this is exactly the kind of real-world perspective we love to hear.

Tokens are designed to give child themes a stable contract with the base theme. Right now, the fragility you're describing happens because themes tend to override raw SCSS variables or target Bootstrap internals directly — so when Moodle or Bootstrap updates, those overrides tend to break.

Instead of overriding something like $h2-font-size and hoping nothing changes underneath it, you'd override a semantic token like font.size.heading.medium that flows through everywhere it's used. Colours, spacing, and typography all work the same way. Your customisations survive updates because you're targeting the intent, not the implementation — which should mean significantly less rework after each release.

We're still working through exactly how the override mechanism will work in Moodle's theme layer, but all of our tokens are currently overridable since they're defined with !default. As we begin building components, they'll be built on top of these tokens throughout — meaning a single token override, say a brand colour, will ripple through every component that uses it rather than requiring you to hunt down individual definitions.

Feedback from people doing this daily is really valuable at this stage, so if you want to dig into specifics or share examples of the kinds of overrides you're currently maintaining, we'd love to hear them.

Tell us your Moodle Marketplace priorities

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:02:46 GMT

by Jane Hostler.

Hi all, just a quick reminder that our Moodle Marketplace Priorities study will close on 31 March.

We’ve had a great response so far, so a big thank you to everyone who's taken the time to participate, it really is very much appreciated.

If you haven't had a chance to share your priorities yet and have 10 minutes to spare before the end of the month, please jump in and get your perspective heard too. Your input will influence what we build next.

Tell us your priorities >

Many thanks,
Jane

Update on the Moodle Design System

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 13:45:00 GMT

by Eduardo Kraus.

Hello Zoe.

I found the initiative very interesting, especially because it tries to create a more consistent foundation between design and development in Moodle, but I had one question from the perspective of those who work with child themes.

How will these design tokens help, in practice, those who need to create and maintain visual customizations on top of a base theme? I ask because today many child theme changes end up relying on SCSS, variable adjustments, and project-specific adaptations.

Is the idea that the tokens will also make this kind of customization easier? For example, by allowing colors, typography, spacing, and other design patterns to be overridden in a more organized and stable way, without making the child theme so fragile with every update?

I think this point is important because, for those who develop themes on a daily basis, the biggest benefit would be being able to customize better with less rework.

Congratulations on the work. I really like the direction, but I am curious to better understand how this connects with the reality of those developing child themes in Moodle.

Eduardo Kraus

Translated using ChatGPT

Returning learners forgetting My courses tab exists

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:30:18 GMT

by Shirley Gregorczyk.

I agree with you - but maybe this will help.

Site administration > Appearance > Navigation

Returning learners forgetting My courses tab exists

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 06:55:22 GMT

by Natalia K.

Every semester we get a spike in support requests from returning learners who can't find their new courses. What happens is they go to the Dashboard, see their recently accessed courses from last semester, and assume their new enrolment isn't there yet.

The root cause is a Moodle UX decision to use the Dashboard for actionable items (recently accessed courses, timeline, calendar), while My courses is where all enrolments live. In the past, My courses block was on the dashboard as well, and limiting Dashboard to only the actionable items makes sense. But returning students have no reason to visit My courses during the semester, so by the time new semester starts, they have completely forgotten that My courses tab exists.

We've looked at enrolment notifications, but our enrolment method (external database sync) doesn't support them (and that moves the problem to extra unnecessary notifications). User tours only fire once and can't be automatically reset. We're currently evaluating a persistent HTML block vs a dismissible banner.

Curious how other institutions are handling this. Perhaps someone has already developed a block that shows "you recently enrolled but not accessed courses"?