Initial Moodle Impressions…

Standard
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.

7 thoughts on “Initial Moodle Impressions…”

  1. So… You’ve used some words that are beyond my frame of reference. I’m glad you got past the screaming goat trouble stage (for now!) If you want to try the themes (including the mobile-responsive theme) that areavailable with the MET Moodle server, you can find it when you go into your course, on the lower left column; course > edit settings > appearance > force theme.

    One warning about the mobile responsive theme is that when I tried it, after changing to the student view I had a total heck of a time switching back to designer setting!

    Also, John has enabled mobile devices with the MET Moodle server, so you can log in (student access only) to the MoodleMobile app for testing 🙂

    Hope this info is of any help! Happy crafting! 🙂

    • bobbik

      Hi Nicola, thanks for the mobile tips! I’ve actually already been playing with several of the themes provided so far (unfortunately there’s one or two that I’d like to use that aren’t available on the UBC Server). I think Archius is the only reponsive theme available to us in 565, and it’s green with some odd styling that I won’t have proper access to change. I’m coming at it from a bit of a different perspective. I’m used to being able to upload, modify and customize the parent themes themselves, but we are unable to do this on the UBC Moodle due to permissions. This ability is more in line with my flightpath, so I’m working both on the UBC Moodle (just with content and some inline custom CSS/HTML which has limitations) and on my own Moodle (full super-admin access like John has). Since I can’t modify the themes on 565A, I’m sticking with adapting some of the content to make it fluid across desktop and mobile. In this case, I’m just using the base theme because it is uncluttered. On my own server I’m looking at modifying a truly responsive theme (this uses css @media queries to determine the screen size of the device accessing it, and dynamically re-sizes/adjusts the layout to fit all devices including mobile). As with WordPress, there’s advantages and disadvantages to mobile themes that I’m still weighing out.

      I’ll definitely install and play with some of the mobile themes on my own Moodle though. I discovered that with super-admin privileges I am actually able to specify 4 separate themes:

      Default – desktop (plus other devices if fully responsive theme)
      Legacy – for older devices I’m guessing, or themes for older versions of Moodle perhaps
      Tablet
      Mobile

      For the time being I’m going to stick to the little bit of styling that’s permitted within the HTML editor for 565A, and play with creating/modifying my own theme on my server. Maybe I can find two themes (one desktop/fluid and one mobile) that I can style to match each other! That’d be cool : )

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