Our abstract for Moodle Moot Dublin has been accepted. Woohoo! Here is the abstract we submitted. See you there! Interface design for rich, beautiful and engaging Moodle courses Most of our Moodle courses used to look to like messy file repositories. The students’ experience of using them was usually functional, but rarely pleasurable. The courses largely consisted […]
Read this post →Author Archives: Paolo Oprandi
14.9.2012
Improving Moodle import. Part 2: testing
The e-learning team has a long term goal of building our testing framework at the same time as writing the specification of a project – something like a test-driven development environment . As a result of being a small team and the way in which some of our projects grow organically this isn’t always possible. The […]
Read this post →29.8.2012
Improving Moodle import. Part 1: the database schema
The Moodle import feature copies resources and activities (mods) from one to course to another. Unfortunately we found the import process rather unintuitive (although better in 2.3), and we wanted to improve its speed, reliability and ease of use. We found that the Moodle import is based on the Moodle backup feature. Moodle backups create […]
Read this post →15.6.2012
100% section titles
Section titles are important for a user to get a good experience of a Moodle site. They are used in the contents menu of the site thus making them primary navigation tools. They are like the chapter names in a textbook. They are essential for giving an overview of the site and for finding content within […]
Read this post →28.3.2012
Favourite Moodle courses
Our Moodle users can have a lot of course sites, but they usually only visit a few of them regularly. In order to make their lives easier we have introduced the concept of “favouriting”. When a user favourites a site it rises to the top of their site list. And when they unfavourite it it […]
Read this post →15.3.2012
Simplifying a Moodle form
I used to think that a good virtual learning environment was the one that was the most flexible. If the technology could enable it, it should enable it. But I could not understand why so few of Sussex tutors ever explored the options that were possible. In 2009 my new colleague Stuart Lamour introduced me […]
Read this post →7.3.2012
Google docs and Moodle integration
Collaborative working is a useful practice to enhance learning. Online document sharing such as that possible with Google docs provides a platform for collaborative working online. This is one of the reasons why we are excited by the possibility of a Google docs and Moodle integration. Another reason we are excited by the integration is that […]
Read this post →18.1.2012
Moodle help
Academics are increasingly expected to make resources for their students available online, however few are skilled at creating web pages. Ideally their online platform (VLE) should be as intuitive as possible for them to use. Where it is not intuitive the help for using the system should be as good as possible. In December we redesigned our […]
Read this post →17.8.2011
Course yearly transition tool
At Sussex we maintain Moodle courses for the students’ programme duration (see this post). This means that each academic year we create new empty Moodle courses for academics to develop. Unsurprising most academic want to copy their courses from the previous year. However the native tools for doing this (import and backup-and-restore) are over complicated. […]
Read this post →10.8.2011
Recent activity in Moodle
We want our Moodle to be a dynamic online space, but there is a barrier to this. Currently to spot if any changes have occured to their moodle sites users have to rely on getting email updates or playing spot the difference for each site they have in moodle – often not a simple task. […]
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