Rev up Moodle 2.3 and 2.4.1 usability with Davo Smith's "Drag and Drop Image into labels" improvement

On of the major weaknesses of Moodle over the past few years is usability and ease of use. Compared to what? Well, compared to Facebook or Google Plus. A major archilles heel of Moodle is the sheer number of mouse clicks you need to add an image to your course page. 14 steps to add an image? That's enough to put any harrassed teacher off Moodle initiation. But Moodle's really getting better, ever since Moodle 2.3 came out.
                    Today's post will introduce you to yet another improvement to core Moodle 2.x code that will make your life, as a course teacher, easier. If you liked Davo Smith's or Moodle 2.3's built-in drag and drop file upload, you will love his new, yet-to-be core Drag and Drop Image (DaDI) improvement update. It works on Moodle 2.3 and 2.4.1. I've installed the 5-file-patch on my Moodle 2.4.1 production site. And I'm loving it. It makes my Moodle course administration experience all-the-more enjoyable.

DaDi in action on my brand new Moodle 2.4.1 production site.

Figure 1. Dragging an image file to my coursepage,
Seconds after releasing the mouse button.

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

Three ways to disable the "Show only one topic / Show all topics" icon in Moodle 1.9

Ever had this need?

In a topics-format course, the "Show only topic N" and "Show all topics" icons present a usability issue. Students who inadvertently click on them become confused when they lose sight of the the other blocks. It would be good if we could disable these icons, either at System or Course level, or perhaps through a new capability.
(John Isner from this Moodle tracker).

In this post I want to present FOUR ways of disabling the "Show only week N" icon

and its sibling, the "Show all weeks" icon.

Tweak your forum so that it shows ALL posts of a specific user made in the same forum. For Moodle 1.9

I dare say that the forum activity in Moodle is a hotbed of ideas and student engagement. For students who love to share their ideas, the forum will be a frequently used resource. Today, I came across this interesting and very useful tweak by Tony Hursh that dates back to 2008. Tony's patch will make a teacher's life easier to track who posted what on a specific forum. This is especially useful in popular forums where there is much debate, views and repartee going back and forth among students.

Learning Outcome
At the end of this post you will gain access to the patch code that allows you to click a link and display all forum posts made by a specific student within one specific forum.