Theme Change
The new theme I selected has a fresher look that connects better to the NMIT colours, the changes are purely around colour and fonts and not interaction or changes of tool locations except for three new features:
Accessibility
The new theme was chosen because it has a strong accessibility focus. The font can be changed to a more easily readable (dyslexic friendly) font as well as colour and contrast changes for those with colour blindness. The settings can be accessed on the bottom left.
Collapsible Sidebars
The sidebars can be hidden on the left and right to allow a cleaner focused read for less visual distraction and cognitive load. They are shown by default on first visit of the course and then Moodle remembers your choice. They can be shown by clicking on these:
Dashboard View
The Dashboard now gives you better options for viewing the courses that you are working on – including favouriting!
If you were using the coloured labels for videos, reading, etc then they may not be working correctly – Paul is working on it.
Moodle Upgrade
We have now upgraded to Moodle 3.9 LTS. It has some nice new changes in the background but as a tutor you will find the new activity chooser to be a lot easier to use than the previous long list of activities. And if you use H5P then you will find that they work a lot faster. You can see the changes here.
ATTO Editor
If your text editor doesn’t look like the one below, then you are missing out being able to add videos and audio directly in the page as well as being able to use a more focused writing environment.
You can change it by clicking on your preferences on the top right and then selecting editor preferences:
New Formatting options
Moodle has a variety of ways of formatting content. The default way is to just have one long page with sections. We tend to use “Onetopic” which gave us tabs along the top with one level of children tabs. However this plugin is no longer being developed. So, we are now moving to a format called “multitopic”.
Multitopic allows for the same functionality as what we currently have but also allows those sections to become sections within pages. What we were previously using labels for. This now Allows for easier changes of importance and ordering. The other big feature is that those sections within pages can be collapsible – useful for information that only needs to be read once.
Have a great holiday break, see you all in the new year.Cheers,Alan