 Hei, ydych chi'n gweld? Mae'n gweithio yng nghymru yn ysgrifennu. Mae'n gweithio'r ysgrifennu, yn ymddech chi'n gweld. Mae'n gweithio, yn ymddech chi. Yn ymddech chi, Andrew, rwy'n leisio ysgrifennu Llywodraeth. Mae'r gwaith yn ymddech chi'n gweithio. Yn ymddech chi'n gweithio, ymddech chi'n gweithio'r ei ddwech. Mae'r gwaith yn ymddech chi'n gweithio'r hwn. Mae'r gwaith yn ei tro i chi'n gweithio. Mae'r gwaith yn ymddech chi'n gweithio'r hwn, ac yn un ar hyn fyddwn i chi ilio'r gweithio elisbyt. Mae'n gweld eisiau hwn, mae hannu'u midol ar y gallu five ysgrifennu, ac yn ymddech chi'n gweithio'r stael, mae'n ddim yn ymddangos medicineol, ac mae'n ddiadd yn sgair fynd ei ddwech. Mae'r ymddech chi'n gweithio'r hyn ein myd, new theme, a whole bunch of new other things in it, so I'm going to take you through what we've been working on. We've made about five or six plug-ins that are around this, a lot of it's to do with our dashboard experience, but some in-course stuff as well. I'm going to just cover a little bit about the process we went through, how we engaged with our stakeholders and just some of the thought processes we went through during this project. It's nothing earth-shattering, but we've made some quite useful customisations that you might find interesting as a room full of moodlers. Maybe not that many other people would find them that interesting, but hopefully we will. It also might be of interest to anyone whose moodle at the moment is looking a bit stale and maybe needing a bit of work in this area of user experience. Hopefully there's not too many of you like that. Or anyone who just comes from that university background like me, which maybe many of you might chime in with you. I also just want to add to the UX conversation a bit that we've been having in some of the other chats so far, especially from the perspective of a big institution that has lots going on and we often have a lot of confinement because of that. It's not just UX done in a blue sky thinking, trying to make things as best they can be. It's also doing that within quite a few limitations that we need to work with. So just looking at large institutions in general, I'm sure this will be familiar to you, but this is what's true at LSBU. We've got a large number and big diversity of courses, of course all kinds of different things going on. We've got thousands of courses every year. We've got many different use cases, role types, things like that. We have students, we have academics, we have administrators, we have external people and we have a whole bunch of other types of people that use our environment and we kind of need them to have a bit of a personalised experience as well. What each type of person needs from their dashboard, et cetera, is not quite the same. There's also many different business areas in our university and I've put competing requirements on the slide, sometimes it's a competition to get your little bit of something on Moodle or your little bit of space, so that's what that was about. We've got lots of processes that go on, academic processes, admin processes, that have to happen either through Moodle or something to do with Moodle or affect something to do with a process or vice versa and there's a lot of information that needs to go along with those. With Moodle's that are out there, you also get everything from course creation that's very tightly focused, you may have lots of learning technologists working for you or you may be a small commercial operation or a large commercial operation where the course content is very well controlled, everything to complete Wild West where we've got lots of hundreds of different people who can all put whatever content they want. LSPU is pretty far over to the Wild West side of that spectrum. We do have some learning technologists scattered around their organisation but generally we're quite thin on the ground on that so a lot of it is down to the academics to get their courses up and do what they need to do with them. The main thing I think that's going to be covered in the first part of this talk is that Moodle is often, it's kind of functions as a hub or a portal for a lot of things or it's what people want it to. We do have other portals for that, we've got a student portal, we have a stuff internet these are the places that are supposed to be where you go to to get other stuff that isn't just your courses and your learning content. However because Moodle is so commonly used and it's the one that people always say that's what the students are using day in, day out we get this kind of increasing demand to put things on Moodle. We often get this, can we just put that thing on Moodle? No it's not really anything to do with exactly what Moodle was designed for so we're kind of wanting Moodle to be a bit more than an LMS sometimes for our institution and we kind of want to max it out but still keep a good user experience get people into their courses and get to their academic content. Lastly change can be painful, I don't know if anyone feels that in their organisation I do in mine, it's not always the case but we can't always easily just adopt the latest greatest thing. We find that we need to take baby steps sometimes and introduce people to change in a gradual way. So interestingly quite a lot of the things that we've been thinking about and this has been going on for actually a few years now there's a bit of history to this project, it's had a few full starts. Some of them have been coming out now and it's becoming more or less standard in Moodle with things like the boosting coming out so there's some parallels there. LSBU, just the problems that we had, quite a few with our existing VLE implementation, themes pretty out of date, you'll see it a little snapshot in a minute of it and the dashboard experience is just not very focused, it's not very effective, it's noisy. We were told that we're not making the best use of this platform as a communication tool, that's not just to do with the courses that are on Moodle but in general and also communicating about the system and how to use it, access to things like help materials. When we engaged with our students we found that one of the biggest problems they had was actually finding what they need and a big part of that is to do with the Wild West side of things and how courses are structured so we can't do too much about that but there were ways which we found which we think helped improve navigation, little tweaks here and there that I'll take you through and we need to make our help and support more visible. These are all the things we were told when we went out to engage. This is our existing dashboard page, current theme. I'll refer it to as the old one but it's still there in place it's going to be replaced with a new one this summer. I think it's kind of ugly. It's pretty out of date. It's rather boring and plain. There's not a lot of differentiation visual hierarchy going on there. It's a big list of courses down the middle as you can see. There is some kind of categorisation. You can see on the right and left we've got different links to all sorts of things. Top right there we've got this notice board. That's news coming in. This is stuff that's supposed to be on our other platform, the student portal platform but people wanted that to feed into Moodle. These links go down and down the page. I can't scroll down on here but this is just the top quarter or something of all the gubbins that we've got down the dashboard page. What we were told when we went and sat down with people and workshop this that nobody looks at either side of that. All they want to do is get to their course so they'll scan down their courses and they'll click on that and we could have anything there. However, when we asked them what could we get rid of out of those things there wasn't much really. People said, yeah, you just get rid of it all. Can you keep this thing and that thing? Before we knew it, more or less we've got back up to the same stuff. Nobody really wanted to get rid of any of the links that the odd 10% of people were used to finding their email by for some reason logging into Moodle scrolling down the page and clicking the 23rd link on the left. We have those people. I help materials that are on this page but it's off the screen here. We have our online support materials so we can't even see it on this page. This is our login page. I'm only showing you that. It's not really important for this talk. It's not really about the design that we went with, the colours or anything. I'm not sure how good it looks anyway on this non-illuminated screen but the only point of showing that is this was the only place we actually put a big splash image on our course because the one thing we weren't asked for is more marketing images, more flashy stuff on the dashboard, big hero images, anything like that. It was quite clear we didn't need that from our particular use case. We're not trying to sell courses to anyone because we want to get people to see the information they need as quickly as possible so we didn't need that. This is what our dashboard looks like. It's still a work in progress. We're at 95% there with all of this but there's a number of plugins we've developed here that I'm going to take you through. You can see it's quite functional. We haven't got big marketing spots or anything going on. Actually this layout has been quite carefully designed in terms of how the three columns balance out so you should find, if you weren't being coached by me, you should find that your eye is probably hitting somewhere around this kind of area here when you're scanning into this page. Now we know that people want to get to their courses and you probably find if you're looking at this when you then switch your attention to find your course your eye is getting pulled over a bit to the left so it's quite far on the left here. That's kind of intentional. We know that's what people are going to want to do but we want to keep this space here active in people's attention so we can put useful things there that we would like people to know are there that are useful to them. They're not shelved off to the sides and not really part of that visual hierarchy. This is our level A hierarchy here and these blocks here, FAQs, sorry you can't hear me, I'm turning around. That would be level B really and then down over here and off the page of course we're at a level C level of importance in terms of that hierarchy of information so we tried to structure everything according to that. In that bottom level, just to cover that we've got a little, this is actually a kind of news slider we're using images here so all those links that we're to do with news that aren't really to do with what you're doing in Moodle necessarily. That's kind of encapsulated by this and it's a different experience for students and staff they'll get different things. So we have kept some of those links we've got this learning links block and sometimes that will be on the page sometimes it will be pushed down a bit depending on what's going on up here but what we felt we had to do what we decided at the end was we had to focus in on what is Moodle for it's a learning tool at LSBU at least it's about carrying out your day to day academic life regarding your curriculum mainly so we kept some links on that main dashboard page but we filtered it down to things that are directly related to that learning so things like library, skills for learning and then the other links we just packed them away up in a menu at the top and that's nothing groundbreaking for Moodle we've been able to have configurable lists of links in many themes we can put that in there the only thing about this one in our theme is that it's configurable by the account type the user type so students or staff or external or admin they can get different sets of links that's just configurable within the theme just a little thing we added so we've got this latest notices feed in the middle that was something we were asked for very commonly in our engagement sessions the students wanted to see mainly from the news forums or what we call announcements forums this is a key thing that we found is maybe one of the number one things people want to do in Moodle is give out these communications so we've given that kind of pride a place it's not the first time anyone's done that but what we wanted to do was make sure that we had a place for a feed of information that's sitting there it's quite similar to the more recent Moodle standard theme where you've got your timeline and then you've got your courses as well in different views but we wanted to make sure we had the list of courses and the feed there and we probably will add other things as well as just forum posts in there for now it's just an aggregated feed of forum posts on the left there we've got our course menu it's quite utilitarian we don't use course images we haven't got little tiles or anything like that and that's partly because at LSBU we knew we were not going to get coverage of getting course images for all the courses 90% of them are going to be a blank square if we do that or a picture of a cloud or something placeholder thing so we keep it pretty simple and this view will compress down what is sections or the groups of courses and for us this was really really important actually because the way we use our Moodle we keep the same Moodle we've kept the same Moodle alive for the last five years and students are supposed to be able to go in and access their last two years of courses so we don't archive at the end of the year we don't, well we do archive but we don't start afresh every year we also have a funny thing where we've got a January intake so the students that just started now in January 2018, they're in the 1718 academic year but by the time they get to September they'll be studying with the next lot but they're still in this academic year so you can end up with a lot of courses and not all of them are the ones that you need right now so what we have is just a simple menu block behind the scenes it's quite powerful for configuration, it's got all the business logic that you can configure it could be something about the course whether it's the course start and end dates whether it's something about the course title the short name something about the category any of those things could decide which section that goes into and you can even have it based on what kind of roles people have on that course so for us for a lecturer teaching that course they have active students on that course because we archive courses by making changing the students role to a read-only role so the lecturers may see a view that is saying something like courses you're teaching this semester and that's what you're seeing or your modules this semester and then you may have something else this is a student view here you've got their modules, their course space other we can really do what we like with that so that's just something a little bit different that we felt to be useful or the other thing that's missing on here not all of this is completely finished we would of course have an all courses button that you can't see on this screen and the site catalogue as well so I'm aware that that's not on there at the moment we've got this help button at the top left here it's a slightly funny thing you don't see that too often in websites like a big help help me out button we thought about this for a while we decided this was a good idea something really obvious that sits in the corner of every page in Moodle whether in a course or in your dashboard or whatever you're in, you've always got this little help button and all that does is when you click on it you get a lightbox or a modal window and whatever HTML we've configured to stick in there will be shown in fact we're going to do something a bit nicer looking and just some text that will probably have some panels to send people to different areas of help it's just your first access point for accessing any help around how to use Moodle and it's blending together of course you'll be the same help might mean how to use this thing in Moodle how to do this thing in an assignment or it might be how to do some related academic process without Moodle so we've got different ways of helping students FAQs online help, face to face training ICT help desk is down the bottom there and this is just a way to quickly direct them through to that help but it's always there and again students will see different help texts there to what the staff will see next on here we've got the FAQs block this is actually something you see it a lot FAQs in different websites I haven't seen it too much in Moodle we actually think it's going to be quite a big game changer for us it's it's kind of what it says on the tin you set up FAQs you can have as many as you like in the system and you decide which ones are going to surface up into this block so we've got another view where you can browse all through the FAQs again it's customizable by the type of user you can see some kinds of FAQs stuff we'll see others admins we'll see different ones the good thing about it is these FAQs are little snippets of information a quick answer to your query or a pointer to where you need to go but it can sit there right there on the course dashboard and it can also be timely as well so we can change these as we go through the academic calendar so if it's a peak submission time what's going to be showing there for the staff how do I do blind marking how do I release my marks to the students how do I set up this or that those kind of things if it's a student it might be how do I actually use toner tin or something like that so we think that's pretty key actually so what you get when you click on a FAQ is you get again a sort of pop up box there modal window you get the answer to the FAQ which is probably often going to have a link out to some other materials some other things you're going to need to see but also at the bottom there we've got the related FAQs so when you set up in the admin panel this is actually an admin interface that isn't quite finished yet so I'm not showing it on here but you've got set up the FAQ who's it for but also you can tag other FAQs in there so that builds up those related questions just a standard kind of thing and then you've got the view all FAQs and that will be a explorer view where you can see all the different categories because they'll be in different categories as well there the next thing quickly is notices on the dashboard you can see here I've noticed it's been placed inside the dashboard what's going on here though is we've got a plugin that's an admin plugin that's a notice manager plugin so we've got four or five different places and locations we can put notices and we've got a number of different kinds of notices that are set up by default and they can be dismissible and things like that so I'll just take you through that quickly so I don't know if you can play spot the difference what changes when I hit the button did anyone spot it some people are going like that yeah this is a now a dismissible notice here so like you'll have seen elsewhere in Moodle, Moodle has these things in core where something happens and you get a little dismissible bootstrap notice but this is ones that we can control and people can view them and decide to dismiss them and it will remain on their dashboard every time they log in until they've dismissed it so we can put that in a block position or a general banner across the top again this one is dismissible and we're using the typical bootstrap style so we've got a red one with an exclamation mark so we have a few ones that are the standard option you can just put the text in and you get a bootstrap thing we can also drop in any HTML we want so it doesn't have to be red or blue it can just be a blank box with whatever HTML we want to put in and it can be dismissed by a little cross or it can be dismissed by a button which has got configurable text when you set the notice up so common thing might be a bit more definite action don't show this again but it could be something else like this this is a different kind of notice that can be is a pop-up notice or a Moodle notice that you see when you log in and so you have to read it and you have to dismiss it and you can't ignore it and it could be for things like T and Cs that's what I've knocked up there it could have a more friendly button okay I get it whatever so this could be used for all kinds of important stuff it might be agreeing to the site policy I'm not sure if this is going to be useful for a GDPR if it fits in with that possibly I don't know and lastly the most annoying type of notice is the one that you can dismiss it but it'll keep coming back again this is like on your bank when you log in to, I don't know, I'm in Santander I think I log in and if you don't click there don't show this message again you'll get it every time I just built that in there for good measure I hope we don't have to use that one too much because it's kind of annoying but if it's something we really really need to make sure that people have seen and registered that they've seen it this is what we can use so that could be for anything so we're really talking about the communication aspect of that platform here and of course because all of these things are dismissals have to be tracked in the database with this it's not like just a javascript click and the thing's gone then we've also got the data so we have all the data everyone who says they've viewed that notice whichever notice it is, anyone who's dismissed it we can, if someone comes in and says we weren't told this we can say yep we've got this whole list this is our audit trail we were told it, the notice was up between these dates and you actually clicked it on this date and said that you'd seen it so that could be useful one more type we've got the one that sits across the top of the site that's probably for downtime, things like that that'll be in all the pages and just to finish up on that the way that works under the hood is that the theme has to expose a few different render points so the theme has to be compatible with that plug-in, it's an admin plug-in where you can figure all your notices and the theme has to be compatible with it and also we have this auxiliary block so you can see that there is a block and your notice can be posted to different positions or you can choose a channel, you can set up channels and the block listens to the channel so anything that's published to that channel will appear in that block so theoretically you could have more than one of these blocks you could have 20 different blocks of different channels, different notices you could put them in a course if you have blocks in your course and you could see the notices there as well so it's quite powerful really it's just how we're trying to enhance what we can do communication-wise okay I think I've been talking for a while now so I'm going to... how long have I got now? couple of minutes okay we just have a couple of minutes left okay I think what I'll do is there's some other stuff I had to show you about what we're doing inside courses but I think it's best to stop there because I've done the dashboard side of things and take any questions if that's okay thank you very much you have done for the course formats what was the main reason for students to complain they couldn't find content in the course formats what was the issue okay so yeah I mean the main thing that the students are always telling us is that they usually they can't find their assignments that's the thing they mainly care about and as I say we have a big variety of types of content creators at the university so we have everything from really well designed courses where students probably aren't complaining about finding things because you can use Moodle to design a decent course and have things put there that are easy to find but the problem is coming where people are not really following the best practices and they're putting just all kinds of things one of the things I was going to show you on the courses was some of the little tweaks we've made to navigation so for example some of our content creators will do is they'll put all sort of content either in that section 0 that appears at the top of every page I don't know if you get this one so every time you scroll through the page you've seen the same page it was only designed for a little banner or something like that or a notice at the top but it's the first thing people see so they'll put a little content in there so we took that off so it becomes your kind of landing page that section 0 is your landing page and then underneath you've got your navigation to your sections they also will put a lot of content sometimes in the description of sections and we tend to use the topics format with the different page per section and that can really muddy the waters as to how you get into the section because by the time you finish reading all that content the link which is the section headings at the top you might have lost track of it or it might be other links within the description you're not sure where you're going so that kind of confusion comes up we did things like the section descriptions we could tail them at a certain point and fade it out and put a little more link so you click on that, that takes you to the actual section we made the whole thing clickable so it's not just the title same with the activities if you've got a certain amount of description the whole box is a big link I was going to show you that but I haven't got time now so it's just trying to find the things that they need to find when we have a lot of content really that's usually the problem just a quick one we're actually in the process of designing a very similar notification system and it looks like you've done all the work for us would you be prepared to share the code or are you able to so my plan with all this is to get everything eventually submitted to plugins directory at this stage it's probably not ready to share in the state it's in but I'm really keen to get there like all the people here I'm saying we're going to make it open source in the end it's January and I plan to get it there we need to get it out working for us first and then the next stage will be to sort of tighten it all up so we can submit it to the plugins directory but if you want to come and chat to me about it then we could take that further Mine's a plugin question as well I don't know if it's something you wrote or something you got from Moodle.org but the plugin that shows the groups of courses on the front page is that something available already or again I'll just switch to the last slide so that's some of the plugins we made or I made for this project there's a couple of others as well that are not so important so the course menu where have you gone they're all at a similar stage they're kind of at their beta or nearly beta stage of completion so none of it's really quite ready for sharing at the moment or worth sharing but the plan is very much as soon as possible once we get it out and up and running that we will be sharing those and I would like to get all of these submitted to the plugins directory so a little not very interesting little plugins that some people will find useful others I think will be quite useful for a lot of people Thank you, this has been really useful we're doing something similar looking at the look and feel of our VLE and we moved to Snap and one thing that we've been looking at when we changed is what you're talking about just recently where you're clicking through to get to places rather than scrolling down all the time and since then we've had feedbacks where they don't like all the clicks so I was just wondering if this has happened to you or kind of what where you are right now with how much students have to will use have to go down the page to find information how much there's less on one page and they click through to get to other places Well, so yeah, do you mean within courses particularly? Yeah Yeah, well with our landing page we've tried to get all the important stuff on the page as much as we can but within reason we've just trying to strike that balance and sometimes they do have to expand a menu to get to the thing that it's we've had to create a priority list within courses we use the standard topics format and the default setting is different page per section for us and we find that almost everybody sticks with that. Some people when they've got shorter courses they want to switch it to everything on one page and I think that's better but we tend to find that our courses the standard module course has got at least 17 or 18 sections it wouldn't, I don't think that would work well as one big page scroll and of course we could do things like the collapse topics format, all those kinds of things but this is one of the limitations I'm talking about when you put it in context there were things that we were when we started doing this project there was a sort of red line drawn around certain things that we were told we had to keep one of them was, we wanted to keep that same format for now until we've developed our own one which is going to be very similar but with other stuff going on, maybe a bit of a mini course dashboard going on there other things like we had to keep the turn editing on button at the top right of the page we weren't allowed to go with the idea of the cog that takes you to the settings we had to keep the course administration block on the left hand side at the bottom underneath those sections because these are what things that people are used to we had to keep the same icons for the activities we were kind of given that little list by the powers that be as it were saying that this is what we're not prepared to change at this point there's going to be enough change going on so we have to keep the user experience familiar especially for the staff who are having to do a lot of work editing the content because it's not as though we have a small team of really hard working learning technologists that we can just train them up and they'll go out and sort it all out for us we've got to deal with the whole big mishmash of people so