As the case with all SLE Working groups, the Moodle look and feel working group have also been busy paving the way to a new look and feel of Moodle with the emphasis on making it a good ‘user‘ experience. All of this work is being done taking into account schools and their requirements as well as making Moodle much more engaging and consistent to both staff and students. The group have also been working hard to ensure that staff and students don’t have a completely new system to start from scratch but are provided with some extras that ensure that there can be an integrated and intuitive learning environment for all.
Of course none of this can be done without obtaining staff and students’ views on how they find using Moodle as it stands at the moment. With the help of Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design at City, user testing(both staff and students) took place in November and December 2012. The scenarios and tasks aimed to test the following areas across both Moodle 1.x and Moodle 2.x included:
• MyMoodle
• Module Details
• Assignment Submissions and
• Calendar
A report has been collated which has been used to inform the recommendations passed on for the design brief. Some of the main problem areas identified were about:
-the ease with which students needed to use the system so for example it wasn’t always clear how My Moodle could be adapted to suit the person. Students tended not to notice the edit button for instance.
-students often wanted to have access to their timetables which were not available through Moodle. City Law School does provide access to timetables within Moodle so this is something that can be enhanced.
-Whilst users appeared to like the fact that each module had it’s own personality, there appeared to be a lack of consistency across different
module details pages.
In addition to these findings, the working group also set about seeking to identify what other institutions sites on Moodle looked like. Here’s a helpful Moodle theme exploration video devised by Matt Jenner at UCL. This was necessary to see if Moodle’s look could be future-proofed and ensure that we knew enough about what we are competing against. Exciting to note is that there will be a fully mobile friendly page, which will make moodle much more usable on a mobile device. As well as that there will of course be a new improved MyMoodle page and module homepage (course format). We aim to keep you posted through weekly vignettes so have a lovely Christmas and watch out for new postings in 2013.
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