Over the past couple of months, in preparation for the new academic year, I have been supporting staff across the Lancaster Medical School (LMS) and the Division of Health and Research (DHR), to redesign their Moodle pages. The aim has been to create more attractive spaces, that are easier to navigate and more engaging for learners.
Last year, while still working in ISS, I led the Moodle User Experience (UX) Project. We did a student survey as part of the project and we got 273 responses. 82% of respondents were undergraduates and 18% were postgraduate taught students. 139 students said that a good Moodle space was a well-organised one and in many of the free-text responses they mentioned the need for images and colour to make the spaces more visually appealing. Overall, students like Moodle but just find the way content is uploaded difficult to navigate. When asked if Moodle was easy or difficult to use, 83% of students found Moodle easy to use or had a neutral impression of it as “neither easy nor difficult”. As part of the UX project, we also surveyed staff. Like the students, staff also want to see more attractive Moodle spaces with more colour and images. So enter…the ‘one section per page’ layout.
I have written about this layout before but, over the past few weeks, I have moved several LMS and DHR Moodle spaces to this new layout and want to share with you all the ‘new look’.
Some of the spaces that have undergone this transformation (or are currently undergoing it) include:
- MBChB Hub
- Year 4 Primary Care
- Medicine Year 4
- Medicine Year 5
- 407: Mental Health: Theory, Research and Practice
- DHR Autumn Academy
- MBCHB101: Problem Based Learning Year 1
How do you set this up?
Before changing settings and choosing images, consider the organisation of material on your Moodle page. Try to have a clear welcome section at the top with introductory materials such as a handbook, learning objectives etc. This section should not be over-filled though and consideration needs to go into whether some of the material should be on the Moodle space, in a Moodle hub space or even in the Lancaster Student Portal instead. Then group materials into larger sections with sub-headings created using the ‘text and media area’ activity. Folders in Moodle, although a good way to group materials, can mean that students can’t quickly find what they are looking for so avoid using too many of them.
To get the ‘one section per page’ layout, you need to have the following settings under the ‘course format’ section of your Moodle page settings:
- Course format: topics
- Course layout: one section per page
Once you have chosen the above options, click ‘save and display’.
To add the summaries:
- Click the three dots menu next to the topic/section you wish to add a summary too.
- Type in your summary. For example, the summary could be some information on what students can find in the section or a ‘to-do’ list for the week.
To add images, choose high quality, landscape images for the best results. These could relate to the topic or subject material or just be high quality photos from around the Lancaster campus.
- Click the image icon.
- Choose a picture from your file explorer. You can add in information about the ‘Author’ and the licence.
- Click ‘upload file’.
- Untick ‘auto-size’ and the best size that I have found is 262wx143h (in pixels).
- The default option for the image alignment is ‘top’, I would recommend leaving this.
- Click ‘save image’.
- Once done, click on the image again and change to ‘left alignment’.
- Then click ‘save changes’.
A full-video explaining how to set up the above, can be found here:
How else can you improve a Moodle space?
Looking beyond the start of term, there are more things that we can do to improve Moodle spaces and the resources stored in Moodle.
Moodle isn’t OneDrive or Dropbox. It shouldn’t just be a list of Word documents, PowerPoints and PDFs! For a more engaging online learning experience, consider creating high quality videos for students to watch that include some interaction where possible. You can ask a Learning Technologist to support you in filming the material if it is something like a ‘Welcome video’ and the University also has Digital Media Engineers who are on hand to create very high-quality videos. Using the H5P activity (HTML5 package activity) in Moodle, it is possible to create an interactive video with quizzes, text boxes and other interactions popping up for students to engage with. H5P can also be used to create over 50 different content types. More information on H5P activities can be found in another post. These activities can support students to engage with your Moodle space more and can support effective revision/review.
It is a legal requirement that the resources posted on Moodle are digitally accessible. This is something that should always be on our minds when we create resources. For more information on how to improve the digital accessibility of your Moodle course, you can read this article on my ‘10 top tips’. One of these tips includes using Blackboard ALLY, the accessibility tool that is integrated into our Lancaster Moodle spaces, to check how accessible your resources are and use the guidance it gives to improve this if necessary. The score gauge provided by ALLY should always be green in colour.
For support with learning design and Moodle, feel free to get in touch with me. More training sessions on how to create H5P activities, digital accessibility and more will be forthcoming in the next couple of months – keep an eye on your emails!