Introducing the new City course format

ERES and LEaD have developed a new City course format to ensure a consistent experience for students using Moodle. In order to develop a new City course format we identified best practice in the School templates to develop four course formats for students to evaluate.

The final City course format was developed based on recommendations from student user evaluations facilitated by the City Interaction Lab. The user evaluation involved students from each School across the University.

To improve the navigation of module modules and to help students locate relevant module content, the City course format has a two column layout with collapsed topics. There is a visible summary of content available within each topic. The Module Dashboard has been built into the format and is available from the centre column.

The Module Dashboard in the City course format has also seen improvements based on findings from our student user evaluation. There are more prominent links to Lecturers and Students from the Dashboard. The link to Lecturers in the central Dashboard means that staff will no longer have to add their name and contact details to HTML blocks in each module. Staff will be able to indicate the Module Leader from the Lecturers link.

Echo 360 has been renamed Lecture capture. If Lecture capture is enabled on a module the link to Lecture capture will be available from the Module Dashboard.

Students also provided useful feedback around the naming of some of our blocks. Upcoming events is now titled Module events and Activity feed has been renamed Module updates in order to convey the contextual nature of these blocks when they appear in a module.

Students wanted clearer labelling of help and support. There is a new Help & Support menu, available from the top navigation bar, providing links for staff and students to guidance on how to use Moodle and direct access to ServiceNow to log a technical query or request additional support.

The development of the City course format will remove the requirement to apply templates to automate the addition of standard blocks to modules as this will be done through the City course format. We are exploring how best to apply the City course format to provide the consistent experience that our students expect when using Moodle to access their learning resources and activities online.

*These images of Moodle are taken from our Development environment and are subject to change prior to the update to Moodle 2.8 on 30th June.