Menu avoids scroll of death, Moodle 2

    I wanted to stop having my students scroll around to find work - and also wanted to stop having to drag units up and down as we move from one to the next.

    So I used Mary Cooch's lovely idea of making my Moodle courses more like web pages (see her video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtHPUh_BaxM) and expanded on it.

    Create a table with a cell for each unit in the unit summary (this is the first Edit icon you see in a topic - when you have editing turned on).  I first added the text, then added an image.  I had to play around with the image sizes a bit to make them all consistent, so the text would all line up.  I put the table in topic 1, but it would probably have been better to put it in the news forum topic. 

    Create a section links block.  This will give you a list of blocks.  You can make the block invisible later, but it will give you the locations for each topic, which you want to link to the correct picture.  Keep it, since you might want to use it later when you add/change topics.

    In the section links block, right click on the number associated with the first picture.  One of your choices is "Copy link location."  Click on that. 

    Then (with editing turned on), while editing your menu, click on the image you want to associate with the link, then click on the link icon, paste the link in, and click on Insert.  I let the default stand - to stay on the same web page.

    Save your edit, then click on the image to make sure you go to the correct topic (so embarrassing when you go to the wrong one).

    Then, if you don't want your students to see anything but your menu, go into Settings, and change the number of topics to 1.  Your students will still be able to get to all those other topics, but when they enter your course, they'll only see the menu.  Caveat:  at least, that's the way I understand that it's supposed to work - not working that way on my installation of Moodle 2 just yet.

Start Here Button

    Recently, I took courses (online, of course) to become a Quality Matters peer reviewer.  (More about that in another post).  One of my classmates there, Mary Wells, talked about having a Start Here Button, a place for students to go for all those beginning-of-course matters – what to do when things go wrong, some information about your teacher, how to navigate the course, and so on.

    I loved the idea and am incorporating it into my courses for next year.  On my sample Moodle course (no student information on it), you can see what this looks like, and one way it can be set up in Moodle.  I put it in its own HTML block at the top, so students will always see it first.  http://tinyurl.com/3wzynwp

    The links in the Start Here block go to documents I stuck in the very last topic for the course.  Thanks to Moodle’s “scroll of death” (= it seems to take forever to get to the bottom), students are unlikely to go down there.  Mary Cooch, Moodle blogger extraordinaire, has come up with a more elegant solution here  http://www.moodleblog.net/?p=24 

    If you don’t already subscribe to Mary’s blog, you should; she is a fount of Moodle wisdom.  http://www.moodleblog.net