Moodle Structure & Scheduling
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Shaping Content
Moodle has multiple course formats, each intended for shaping the course content in different ways, so I’ll cover content shaping first for Moodle, in order to contextualise the structural elements.
The default formats are:
Weekly - Presents sections as weeks of study, with date headings based on the start date of the course, or by relative dates for a learner if relative dates are enabled. The intent is to drive learners to keep pace and stay together by putting expected dates on everything. Topics are automatically named by date, but these can be overridden. If overridden, then the other topics do not rename accordingly. This was the old default behaviour of Moodle.
Topics - This is now the default behaviour of sections in Moodle. Instead of being tied to any time measure, sections are given arbitrary topics, effectively resulting in the same course format as Open edX. Topics are automatically numbered by default, but can be renamed, which renumbers all the automatic topic names (Topic 1, 2, 3, etc.)
Social - The social format puts a discussion forum as the main page of the course, and is intended for use-cases that may not even be courses. When a course is put into the social format, an optional block has to be enabled to add activities and resources to the sidebar of the course, called the Social Activities block. This adds activities for people to complete on the side of the discussion forum, focusing the user experience on the forum first, and learning materials second.
Single Activity - Originally designed for SCORM courses, this strips away all the structure of a regular course and simply presents a single activity as the course. This can now be any activity type, such as a quiz, proctored exam, LTI tool, SCORM package, group project, or just about any other graded activity. An example of this as a quiz can be found over on the Moodle demo site under “Moodle History Quiz”.
Additional course formats are available in the community as third-party plugins, some of the popular ones listed in the documentation including:
Daily - like the weekly format, but designed for day-by-day content, where each section is automatically named by day (relatively or from course start date)
Kickstart - Creates course skeletons using a third-party course template engine
Buttons - Allows navigation of courses using horizontally-aligned buttons
Almost all of the third-party formats listed in their documentation are variations on the Topics format, which may be telling about the popularity of the different default course formats.
These formats fundamentally change the structure of content in a way that matches the course format. Topics are relatively unopinionated, whereas other formats are directly intended to shape content and course experience to the one intended by the format, which is interesting.
Moodle’s content insertion methods themselves shape how content is created, with tools to insert content being split between the notions of Activities and Resources.
As items are given the explicit designation of either being an activity or a resource, the expectation is that an activity is active learning, whereas resources are always assimilative, and the two do not mix. This once again shapes the content, because with only a few exceptions, it’s actively difficult to use these items for anything other than their classification (to make an activity assimilative, for example).
Structuring Content
Content in Moodle is structured from within the course itself - Moodle does not have a separate authoring environment, instead it has a toggle that puts the view of the course into “edit mode”.
A pencil icon indicates where the names of content can be modified from the outline, and the dots provide access to a context menu, which has standard options for all learning elements, regardless of whether they are activities or resources.
This ensures that this menu is always consistent, which I like in concept. Any specific settings are always found within the Edit Settings page, which is navigated to on selecting that option. Most of these options are self-explanatory, but it’s worth a few clarifications on the ones that were less clear to me:
Move right indents content by a single level, which is displayed in both the course outline view and the navigation. While this is a relatively minor change that I first thought was strange, there’s a fascinating product discussion about this relatively minor change in their community that’s worth recapping because it can inform a lot of our discussions around structure:
In versions of Moodle prior to Moodle 4.0, content could be indented right and left freely. This led to people creating awful-looking courses that had a huge amount of depth to course structures, with multiple levels of indentation. This meant that the user experience was impacted, particularly on smaller devices with Moodle 4.0’s new “card”-like experience.
The community, making considerable use of indentation to apply additional structure to courses, objected strongly to this (as an understatement).
In Moodle 4.2, Moodle reimplemented a single level of indentation, which is what we can see here:
As this was still not enough for the community, Moodle presented this as a short-term solution while they researched a longer-term solution
They held a workshop with their community where they brainstormed a solution. Despite the size of the Moodle community, only 8 users participated. Unknown whether this was by invitation only.
The research they did resulted in a stated need for 3 levels of content hierarchy - “Topic/section > Main/Primary activity > Indented activity”. So they’re intending to move to three levels in the future.
The community remains split on this issue, with a lot of users remaining on older versions as long as possible, and others upgrading but moving to fully supporting the Flexible Sections format, which essentially adds the concept of subsections.
Assign roles allows users to be assigned specific roles within individual elements. For example, a custom role could be created that allows a user to edit the content of pages called “Guest Blogger”. Then pages can be created within the courses, and a user could be granted that role with permission to edit that page and only that page. Roles and permissions in Moodle are insanely flexible.
Other than that, Topics work much as you would expect - they serve as containers for content. Content can exist within a page, which is linked from the course outline, or it can exist on the outline level itself:
In the example above, the section contains three resources:
a text and media area
a lesson (a sequence of resources and activities similar to an Open edX subsection)
A page (a generic page of content built in a WYSIWYG HTML editor)
These are added to the topic by clicking a button under the topic in which it should be created, and new topics are added by the new topic button, which surprisingly is located within the previous section (it is not visible until you expand the section you want it to appear after, which seems like a flawed user experience):
Scheduling and Releasing Content
The course settings of Moodle have a very simple course start and end date/time, with the end date being optional:
The course relative dates feature is an optional, experimental setting implemented a few years ago but not yet made part of the core. With relative dates enabled, it shifts all dates relative to when the learner joins the course. So week 2 becomes enrollment date + 1 week, in the weekly format. This is not respected by everything, and the implementation seems niche and half-baked, despite being a few years old, indicating that it’s not probably seen much usage in the community.
Content releases are controlled by restrictions, which are a lot more beefy than simple release dates. Each section, activity, resource, or other element has a Restrictions property.
Adding a restriction allows course staff to restrict access to particular content based on having completed an activity, a specific release date, requiring a specific grade, having specific user profile traits, or a nested combination of all of those things, such as restricting access to a specific date for users with a passing grade called Tim who live in Tanzania. Restrictions can also be set to “must” or “must not”, so the inverse of a restriction can be applied (such as allowing access for everyone except Tim).
Important Lessons from Moodle
The conclusion of the “Move Right” fiasco essentially backs up something I’ve heard from Open edX users who want to create content at different levels of the hierarchy. If we had the ability to create content at:
Top level (units existing in the navigation outside of sections)
Section level (units existing within a section, without a subsection)
Subsection level (units that exist within a subsection which exists within a section, per current content)
We’d end up with 3 levels of hierarchy, which exactly matches the need that Moodle found in their discussions with their users. This cements my belief that this need has a single “correct” solution, at least in the eyes of existing LMS users. Wildly off topic, but here’s a basic concept of this, though subsections should really be indicated better:
Moodle’s roles and permissions in general are insanely flexible, and worth considering in terms of how much flexibility in permissions should be given, as right now Open edX has extremely rigid roles that are always predefined and fixed in what they can do. We do not, for example, have a role that can act as an instructor but not edit course content, outside of CCX courses which are half-baked at best.
Moodle’s 4.0 experience of creating content and arranging the structure is pleasing and intuitive, and doing everything from essentially the learner view of the outline means that the author experience isn’t abstracted from the learner experience. At the very least we should probably at least try to make the two halves of the platform have a similar authoring experience, as Studio no longer looks anything like the learner experience, making it not truly WYSIWYG, unlike Moodle (at least in the outline, nothing in-content is truly WYSIWYG in Moodle).
Moodle’s implementation of fine granular restrictions is impressive. It’s a bit clunky to use and not immediately intuitive, but it’s definitely a lot more powerful than what we have available, as is typically the case with anything to do with roles and permissions, as Moodle is very fundamentally authoritarian and permission-driven in its design. I don’t think we should copy their approach to controlling everything ruthlessly, but greater flexibility on who can access content beyond simple release dates and “is staff” would definitely be worth investigating.
While Moodle admittedly does a lot of things right, the general editing experience when it comes to settings is extremely poor and not aspirational in the slightest. Reading this all back, it understates just how much I do not like Moodle’s UX, even if a lot of it was dramatically improved in Moodle 4.X. For example, this disaster of stacks of collapsing, often vaguely named menus is not OK, which is definitely a lesson worth learning:
This is a relatively tame example, but Moodle’s feature bloat has led to every component having at least 30 different settings contained within 10+ sub-menus, and it’s an incredibly daunting, unfriendly experience.