Autohide Revisited - Reducing the clutter of "Turn Editing On"

As a Moodle administrator of a Moodle 2.4 site, you might be used to seeing the repetitive editing icons shown when your site is in the "Turn Editing On" mode. It's a common sight for a Moodle administrator and the icons provide sufficient visual cues for a newbie to administer a site.

Well, that's Moodle out of the box. Lots of useful
editing icons. It's just that you usually edit only one thing at a time.
NOW YOU SEE IT (THEM)......

Since March 2012, the generous, helpful and talented Moodle community has been perfecting the Autohide feature of Moodle 2.x (Autohide and that Move icon, 2013). It is now, in my humble opinion, a must-have tool for Moodle 2.3/2.4 administrators. Autohide hides the editing icons until a hover or mouseover is done. This, to me, makes a lot of sense since too many icons leads to information overload. I mean the mouse cursor can appear at only one location at a time. So why show all the editing icons at once?

Here it is - my FREE Limited-Features Version of the Wall for Moodle 2.x

Dear All
I am releasing a free version -and- limited-features version of the wall for Moodle 2.x. This wall has been tested under Moodle 2.2. You can download it, try to install it. If you succeed, you are a Moodle-PHP Guru. If not, you can always E-mail me, right?  If you successfully set it up on your Moodle site, you are free to modify or customise it. This wall is a modification of Srinivas Tamada's Facebook-like Wall Script 3.0 which is free.

Moodle Sharing of Best Practices Seminar on 7 February 2013, open to ALL Malaysian Institution of Higher Learning

Originally posted at Facebook's "Moodle Malaysia Boleh" group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/188275691224821/

Assalamualaikum wr wb / Good Day!
Happy New Year!
Academic Development Centre (ADeC), University of Malaya is pleased to announce that we are organizing a one-day seminar entitled: Moodle Sharing of Best Practices Seminar on 7 February 2013, open to ALL Malaysian Institution of Higher Learning (IPTA/IPTS). We would like to invite those who have been using Moodle to come and share how Moodle has helped them making learning and teaching more effective. Those who are just interested to find more ways in engaging learners are invited as participants.
We would appreciate it very much if you could share this invitation with other Moodle enthusiasts.
Please see the attached brochure and registration form.
Thank you.
A Halim Sulaiman
--
Warm regards,
Academic Development Centre (ADeC)
Level 14, Wisma R & D
University of Malaya
50603 Kuala Lumpur
Tel: +603-2246 3349 / +6017-388 4127
Fax : +603-2246 3352

Moodle 2013 seminar brochure with form.pdf
Download · Upload Revision

IMPORTANT UPDATE ON JANUARY 22ND 2013

Assalamualaikum wr wb / Good Day!

As announced earlier, Academic Development Centre (ADeC), University of Malaya is organizing a one-day seminar entitled: Moodle Sharing of Best Practices Seminar on 7 February 2013.

This seminar is open to ALL Malaysian Institutions of Higher Learning (IPTA/IPTS). We would like to invite those who have been using Moodle to come and share how Moodle has helped in making learning and teaching more effective. Those who are just interested to find more ways in engaging learners are invited as participants.

Good news! We have received a very generous offer from Pukunui Malaysia (Thank you Vinny!) to partially sponsor the event. We are happy to inform you that registration fee has been reduced to RM50.

Vinny has also agreed to run a 50-minute workshop to show participants some of the lesser used Moodle features (e.g. conditional activities, course/activity completion tracking and orphaned activities).

For more information, please see the attached brochure.

To register online, please fill in the form below :

https://docs.google.com/a/um.edu.my/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dE0zTlZDdnh6UGI5N3hKalNNVkJoUkE6MQ#gid=0

For inquiries, please contact 03 2246 3349/3350.

Thank you.
A Halim Sulaiman

Drag And Drop Upload and Collapsed Weeks course format combo to raise the usability of your Moodle 1.9.x site.

Graphic From:
http://dequitypartners.com.au/

syn·er·gy  

/ˈsinərjē/

Noun The interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the...: "the synergy between artist and record company"

Davo Smith's brilliant Drag and Drop Upload (DADU) block is a must-have for any Moodle 1.9 site. I have yet to meet someone, new to Moodle, who wasn't impressed with the ease of adding a file to a Moodle course page by clicking and dragging the mouse pointer.

Equally brilliant is the Collapsed Weeks course format by Gareth J. Barnard. This course format is one way of beating the Moodle Scroll Of Death, brought about by the default Weekly or Topics course format. I am using a modified version of Gareth's Collapsed Weeks course format - one that shows the week dates as well as either the week number or a description of the week's topics.

Of course, Moodle 2.2 has the DADU feature built into it. So those of you who use Moodle 2.x are probably wondering what the fuss is all about. Anyway, yesterday, one of my colleagues wanted to know how to use Moodle and I wanted to impress him with the Drag and Drop feature of Moodle 1.9. Unfortunately I forgot that the original block only worked with the default Weekly or Topics format. So I had to switch to the Weekly course format to show him the feature.

Arriving back home from work, I kept thinking how wonderful it would be if I could enable the DADU block to work with my beloved Collapsed Weeks course format. So I headed off to http://moodle.org and posted a question in the Course Formats forum. Gareth, the resident moderator and gatekeeper of the forum replied to my query. He informed me that there actually was a patch jointly written a year ago by both Davo and himself. The solution is to replace just two lines of code, as shown below.

Figure 1. Patch two lines of code of dndupload.js
of Davo Smith's Drag-and-Drop Upload block 

I then tested my course page by turning Settings to On. I then dragged two files from my PC's Desktop to Week8 area. Wola! It works.

Figure 2. The Drag and Drop Upload works in the
Collapsed Weeks course format on my Moodle 1.9.15 site.
Such synergy! This raises the usability of my site by a factor of at least 3.

So there you have it. For all half-fossilized dinosaurs running on Moodle 1.9.x (compared to Moodle 2.4 that is), you can raise the usability of your Moodle production site by several notches by combining both the DADU and Collapsed Weeks course format. I have on my site. 2+2 does equal to 5. What other examples of Moodle plugins synergy do you know of? Please share your discoveries with me. Now to impress a few more colleagues next Monday....

Keep Moodling
Frankie "Moodlesaurus" Kam