When you create a Moodle course you can add two generic types of learning material. One provides non-interactive content, and the other provides tools for student interaction. Moodle calls these two material types: “resources” and “activities”.
Tutors create the material types through Moodle modules/mods, the names of which reflect what they do – so the “folder” mod creates a resource which displays a file directory and the “forum” mod creates an online space where students can engage in discussions.
However, we found that two of the “resource” mods had ambiguous names:-
Moodle has separate mods for creating non-interactive content to be displayed directly on the course page and non-interactive content to be displayed on a new page. They call the former the “Label” mod and the latter the “Page” mod.
These mod names do not accurately convey what they do (particularly after we had customised the display of a Moodle “Page”). Accordingly some tutors weren’t using them when they could have been.
Informal chats and interviews revealed more descriptive titles for the mods.
The research showed that the “Label” is usually used to provide learning content in the form of text or graphics, and so is not really a label for anything. We found “Displayed content” was more of a useful name and that tutors would find an image useful to illustrate what it did.
In our Moodle the “Page” is nested within the Moodle course and the content is revealed on the same page when the title is clicked (a blog post about this is coming). It is therefore is not really a page at all. We found “Click-to-reveal content” was more of a descriptive name and, as before, that an image would be useful to illustrate what it did.
And when a tutor adds a resource in our Moodle they get the following dialog box.
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