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Yearly Archives: 2012

Abstract accepted: Moodlemoot Ireland 2013

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 […]

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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 […]

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Better user experience; better learning experience?

In order for students to have great learning experiences, we believe that students, and the people who teach and support them, need to have great user experiences. That’s been at the heart of the work that we’ve been doing since 2010. John and I are in Manchester at ALT-C 2012, where we’ve presented a paper […]

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Moodle usability – interviews from 2010 (#1)

In 2010, Graham MacAllister,  founder of  Player Research, interviewed a number of staff members here at Sussex and videoed them interacting with our old version of Moodle. These videos – and Graham’s subsequent report – were very helpful to us in deciding on the priorities and approaches to adopt in taking forward the work that […]

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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 […]

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Moodle icons

Question : What do you need from an open source cms and icons on the web today? Clean separation of content and decorative elements Icons scalable for different devices Optimisation of icons and markup for page loading times Easy to skin/theme The moodle roadmap currently contains an issue – Completely new default icon set and graphic design – […]

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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 […]

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Editing activities, labels & resource

We did some work earlier this year on looking at whats been called moodle’s edit clutter. The edit clutter can roughly be described as the screen ‘noise’ provided by all the amount of icons on a moodle site when your editing content. Alongside the edit clutter we also tried to help with a common question our tutors […]

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Ireland and UK Moodlemoot 2012

Two weeks have passed since the Ireland and UK Moodlemoot and a number of participants have written some excellent blog posts that summarise their experiences of the event. I thought I’d use this post to focus on one particular presentation – by my colleague Stuart Lamour. It may seem a little strange to be commenting […]

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