Okay, I’ll admit that my initial experience with the Moodle back-end creating a Moodle install and setting up a course from scratch was a bit frustrating. I did this on my own hosting provider/server with the idea that I’d transfer stuff over to the 565 setup later. I’m a believer in exploring the interface to see if it’s intuitive before resorting to the traditional RTfM approach (that’s usually step 2). [Please forgive my informal conscious-stream-of-thought style narrative here].
The first thing I did (after setting up the course) was to try to create the “general” or “summary” information page that appears at the top of a course…so I went to the toolkit provided and began to follow some of the instructions there. I ended up with a page link inside of the top listing. Hmm, that’s not quite what I was after. I’m pretty sure you can have an image at the top of the course as well as some content.
So then I tried: “Edit Course Settings” > “Description” and added my content there. Check it…huh, this ends up somewhere else too, probably at the top-level of the course listings perhaps.
So off to the Moodle support site and Google search to find my solution. But how does one refer to this section exactly? There’s no label, button or indication.
A bit of fumbling around lead me to finally watch a Youtube video (for a related topic) which gave it away. Ohhh, it’s the tiny little grey gear icon floating randomly above the first week that I should have intuitively known to click (sarcasm here). Okay, fine. Time to delete all that other stuff I created in the wrong spots and get serious now.
So I upload a nice but compressed banner image (because I feel like there should be something to greet the student and let him/her know they are indeed in the right place). I save the page and try shrinking the window to see what happens to my image on smaller screen devices. D’oh! It’s not responsive. Okay, no worries, in a web page or WordPress you can simply go into the HTML editor and delete the image dimension assigned to it by the image uploader, then it will adhere to 100% of the page width, and will re-size itself when the page is shrunk.
No dice. Hmm, okay. Fine. I’ll wrap it in a DIV with a style of 100% width, make sure there’s no size dimension for the image, and it should re-size both as the page shrinks .. but wait, how the heck do I use HTML elements and CSS styling in Moodle?
Back to Google Search & Moodle Docs re:HTML/CSS formatting and styling. This was fairly useless, advice was: create your own theme. What about inline styles? It’s a messy and a pain, but it should work. Maybe, but the editor doesn’t support code hinting or indenting; so am I going to go blind working with it? Hmm, it allows for new lines without inserting a line break…
Try adding some custom HTML/CSS and we have a winner! Okay, its unintuitive to get started, but I can have more control over the layout using HTML instead of the standard editor (sort of) maybe this is cool!?!
Phew, for a while there I was feeling a lot like the screaming goat.