In this chapter, we will cover:
Moodle employs a very simple navigation model. Course links are all shown on the course main page, so users are only one click away from a resource or activity. However, this simple, shallow navigation comes at a cost—long course pages.
In a real course with content that spans an entire teaching period, the length of course pages can grow many screens. Apart from the annoying scrolling needed to locate links, the sheer number of links can cause relevant content to become lost in a tangle of sameness. These modules allow teachers to focus student attention to what is current and important.
This chapter looks at modules that can be added to Moodle that attempt to address the need to better manage the space in a course page and offer easier navigation to users.
One way to remove content from the central sections of a course main page is to put it into a block. It is possible to put links to resources and activities in a block. As well as creating space in the central area, this creates the potential to highlight important links.
One easy way to use space more effectively is to collapse content down and allow users to expand what they need when they need it. A number of well designed course formats can provide this potential. Collapsing can happen around hierarchically related resources and activities to form a tree-like structure, or around whole topics or weeks:
Tabs are another way of taking a regular course page and dividing its content into smaller chunks. There are a number of formats that attempt this:
If time is an important factor in a course, but the course runs over many weeks, then changing the time scale to months can reduce the number of sections needed, and also the space used.