Theming moodle for integration and usability

Theming Moodle for Integration & Usability

Alex WalkerCity of Glasgow College

The City of Glasgow College

• Colleges in Scotland merging into regional super-colleges.

• City of Glasgow College formed in 2011, when three Glasgow city centre colleges merged.


Bb8.0

m1.9.8

m1.9.8

469628

CoursesSta! Accounts

672363


609157



m2.4.0

3,93216,102

CoursesActive Users

Our Strategy

• Moodle as our main student portal.

• Custom developments that add functionality to Moodle.

• Other services that sit alongside Moodle.

Our Strategy

Moodle Mahara

Video Repository

Voting System

Private File Sharing

Enrolment Database

Exam View

‘Print Room’

Badges

Advertising

Video Repository

• A place to store videos we can’t put on YouTube.

• Guest lectures, videos made by our TV students, etc.

• Delivered in HTML 5, or Flash for older browsers. Works on iPhone.

• Not yet a Moodle repository.

Exam View

• Allows students to see their results from within Moodle.

• Developed in 2010 with JISC funding.

• Released to the community.

Voting System

• Students can vote in executive elections.

• Clicking a link in our Moodle navigation block takes them to the voting system.

• Students can only vote once, but votes are stored anonymously.

The Challenges

• Lots of systems that look di!erent and work in di!erent ways.

• Di!erent URLS for sta! to remember.

• Trying to raise awareness of di!erent services we o!er.

Our Approach

• Come up with a department ‘look and feel’ to apply to all our sites.

• Think about the building blocks that make up the web applications.

• Improve consistency by re-using blocks and layout techniques.

Our Visual Style

• Our college had a design team.

• They came up with the MyCity logo, and gave us a ‘department colour’.

• I built a prototype Moodle theme, and got feedback from my team.

• It has slowly evolved ever since.

Our Visual Style

Our Visual Style

• Looked at the existing college Moodles.

• Looked at what other colleges were doing with Moodle.

• Looked at how popular websites were laying out their site.

Our Visual Style

Why Facebook

• Facebook has about 1 billion users.

• What percentage of your sta! and students are Facebook users?

• Facebook employ some very talented user interface designers.

• Constantly add features to their site, but keep a neat, intuitive interface.

Our Visual Style

Our Visual Style

• We wanted to have the same style on all our links / buttons / tables etc.

• Started writing our own re-usable CSS library.

• Contained rules for buttons, multi-column page layouts with sidebars, and made tables look pretty.

Our Visual Style

Our Visual Style

• In mid-2012, replaced our own CSS library with the Twitter Boostrap.

• Provides buttons, image styles, navigation tools, noti"cations and a lot more.

Our Visual Style

Navigation

• Two navigation devices on our sites.

• Dashboard for navigation of the current site or service.

• Black Bar for moving between college services.

Dashboard

• Top of dashboard contains the name and avatar of the logged-in user.

• Top menu link is always ‘Home’.

• Bottom menu link is always ‘Log out’.

• Trying to display the user’s Moodle avatar in all our other systems.

Navigation

Dashboard

• We don’t use Moodle’s Navigation block.

• Two blocks replace it: My Courses, and Dashboard.

Black Bar

• Displayed at the top of all our services.

• Links to the college website, Learning Technologies services and other departments in the college.

• Old, simple menu being replaced by new drop-down ‘mega menu’

Navigation

The ‘Mega Menu’

• A relatively new interface tool for displaying links in a well-ordered hierarchy.

• Lets us put more content within easy reach of the user.

• Currently on our Moodle, will be rolled out to other services soon.

Navigation

The ‘Mega Menu’

• A relatively new interface tool for displaying links in a well-ordered hierarchy.

• Lets us put more content within easy reach of the user.

• Currently on our Moodle, will be rolled out to other services soon.

Navigation

‘Smart Features’

• Give the user visual feedback when something needs attention.

• Dashboard and icon bar light up when you have unread messages.

‘Smart Features’

Custom Course Format

• Moodle 2 o!ers several course formats, and you can write your own.

• Examples are ‘Topics’, ‘Weeks’, ‘Social’, ‘Grid’...

• We custom-wrote a modi"ed version of ‘Topics’ called ‘City’.

Custom Course Format

Measuring Performance

• Analytics and Heatmaps are used to measure the performance of our Moodle.

• Provide useful statistics for how we can improve our services.

• Browser / OS / device statistics help us target future developments.


• Piwik used for analytics.

• It’s on open-source alternative to Google Analytics you host in-house.

• Custom variable tracking allows you to track extra things.


• ClickHeat used to track page clicks.

• Lets us know which page elements are well used and which aren’t.

• We can remove things that aren’t well used, to make better use of the space.

Questions

Alex WalkerCity of Glasgow College

Theming moodle for integration and usability

Documents

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