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Category Archives: moodle development

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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Moodle breadcrumb

When navigating a web site I like to know where I am so I do not feel disorientated or lost. Most web sites have a breadcrumb bar to help me with this. The metaphor is that the user has left a trail of breadcrumbs whilst traversing the site so he or she can retrace their […]

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Moodle pages format

Here is a short video of a new format (for moodle2 and 1.9) we are currently calling pages. [vimeo width=”700″ height=”490″]http://vimeo.com/23476517[/vimeo] We hope the pages format is similar to design patterns used in other websites, CMS and web based apps and as such familiar and intuitive for users. A by-product the pages format is that there […]

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Creating groups automatically in Moodle

At their MoodleMoot UK 2011 presentation, Paolo and Stuart outlined some of changes that have been made to Study Direct (Moodle at Sussex) to improve the user experience for both staff and students. Improving the ‘groups’ feature in Moodle was one such development and the changes made went live at the start of the Summer […]

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Making your WYSIWYG content look the same when editing as when published

For any content author there is nothing worse than applying formatting in a WYSIWYG editor, and then finding it all looks different when they publish it. This applies to our tutors in moodle too. Making the WYSIWYG editor content look the same as when its publish is something we did a while back in moodle. […]

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Making Moodle a scaleable enterprise solution

An early task after installing Moodle is to integrate as much existing data held within an institution that would be helpful in the virtual learning environment (VLE) context.  Even though Sussex has had an institutional Moodle installation since 2006 there are still many possibilities for further integration. Pre-existing Sussex systems Sussex has a history of ORACLE development […]

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Moodle Developments – Giving Moodle courses visual identities

Good web experiences usually implies one which is intuitive and visually appealing. This implies using visual identifiers in conjunction with texts, reducing the need to read in order to make meaning and navigate the site. Off-the-shelf Moodle has no way of giving course sites a visual identity.  This means that list of sites such as […]

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Moodle history/extended memory issue – cache with $USER->display & course_display

The problem : When a user in moodle chooses to view a single section of a site, they are shown the section as expected. Moodle stores which section you are viewing, so that when you go to a resource or activity and then return to the site, you are still viewing the section you last […]

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Moodle Developments – Quick editor toolbar

In Moodle some of the things users need to quickly do can be buried in the middle of a form, without an obvious label. In order to help out our staff and tutors we added a quick editor toobar which has the common settings that Moodle editors often need to change in their sites.  The toolbar is […]

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Maintaining sites for the students’ programme duration

At Sussex we made a decision that Moodle sites which related to a Sussex course should be maintained for the duration of the students’ degree programme. This means for any particular course we have sites for every year it is run. For example Sussex 3rd year students have Moodle sites for all the course modules […]

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