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Moodle Gripes #1

A week away at summer school, and it's sooooooooo hard getting back into the blogging routine..

Anyway - a gentle start: here is the first of what I guess will be many Moodle gripes as I start to play with a demo course in the current VLE sandpit (mine's VLE Library Demo if you want to check it out - OU authentication required, I suspect...).

Mumble #1: to reorder panels on the screen you have to use up, down and sidways arrows, moving the block one step at a time... Needless to say, new blocks are added at the bottom of the column, which makes for a slow and painful seriesd of clicks to move a panel up to the top.

It's at times like this I realise how much I like drag and drop, as in Netvibes or MyOpenLibrary (Web 2.0 style alpha).

(There are so many toolkits out there now that make this thing easy, I found I've come to expect this... Hmm - there's a Moodlemoot here next week - I wonder if they have a hackfest as part of it? If so, I wonder what the chances are of someone pulling together a prototype/scriptaculous (or similar) js toolkit/framework for Moodle? Hmm - it seems they do have a hackfest, but there's nothing interesting suggested ;-)

And before anyone says it's a low spec browser compatibility thing for the students, users can't reorder the layout of the blocks on the screen...

...which may or may not be another grumble in its own right...

Ah well, the Moodle interface isn't supposed to be a whizzy webtop is it?

PS my first doodles were to add Grazr, SpiffySearch and Embeddable deliSearch into separate HTML panels. First impression is they seem to work okay, though it would be handy if the system offered a way of autoloading a specified stylesheet to handle any styling quirks required within the block...

Technorati Tags: webtop, elearning, moodle

Posted by ajh59 at July 19, 2006 09:20 PM