Moodle: How to stop your students getting lost in the digital maze!

Making Moodle pages easier to navigate and content easier to find.

The CSM Digital Learning team would love to work with you to help you redesign your Moodle pages to meet the needs of staff and students. However, we recognise that we may not be able to reach you all, at least for now. So in the meantime we have gathered some resources that will help you consider the basic principles of organising your Moodle site, and tutorial videos that will help you to implement techniques to keep your content under control. Feel free to consume this resource in any order. You can use the content list below to skip to the sections you are most interested in.

Please email us at csmdigitallearning@arts.ac.uk to arrange a meeting with your course team representatives.

Contents:

1. What do the students think about Moodle?
2. Categorising your content
3. Ensuring consistent implementation
4. Don’t overcrowd a page
5. How to implement tab display for a Video Archive
6. How to use folders to clean up your page
7. How to add highlights and Indents to make content clearer

1. What do the students think about Moodle?

Over the last year we have managed to get some valuable feedback from our students. One of the consistent themes that have emerged in these discussions, is that students are finding it difficult to find the information they need.

(image from ualmemes_ , February 2021)

So, it is with this in mind we have collected some resources to help you when you are thinking about adding content to your Moodle pages.  The goal is to make it easier for you to edit your pages, and easier for students to find what they need.  

2. Categorising your content

When setting up your page you can choose whether to  categorise by topics or chronologically.

Topic schemes (ie based on subject matter) are very useful for students if they know what key words they will need to access the information they are looking for.

Chronological schemes (ie based on date) are useful if the student knows exactly when something happened.

It is helpful to be mindful of how you describe your course to the students, when choosing how to categorise your information. Peter Beare and the Teaching Exchange have produced some excellent short videos to outline how to organise your learning materials and how to group content:

3. Ensuring consistent implementation

If your content is displayed consistently your students don’t have to relearn where to find information when the need it. They can then concentrate on what you are trying to teach them.

Here are some tips on ensuring consistency across your Moodle pages. You may have to take a team approach on these, depending on who is contributing to the content on Moodle.

• Give pages across the course the same structure: If students are being expected to access different pages across your Moodle site,  try and ensure those pages follow a similar structure. This will help to make each page familiar.

• Use naming conventions: By using consistent, logical, and predictable names for files and folders information will be much easier to find. You should ensure file names are:        
  1. Unique
  2. Indicate what the file contains
  3. Ordered to contain primary information first
  4. Consistently implemented
  5. Understood by everyone

• Provide clear and consistent instructions: Don’t assume that your students know what to do with a file. For example, you can include instructions in a label, description or in the resource itself.

• Be visually consistent: Text styles available in Moodle’s text editor allow you to easily organise information using headings and subheadings, which also makes your content more accessible.

4. Don’t overcrowd a page

Students can feel overwhelmed when presented with a large numbers of documents and resources. It’s hard for students to work out what is relevant and the most useful to them. It can also create what is known in the business as the ‘scroll of death’. Consider the following:

• Only add the most relevant documents to each section
• Set your Moodle site to only show one section at a time

If you do have a large number of resources that the students need to access, the following techniques can help you to structure that content to make it easier to find and reduce the ‘scroll of death’.

5. How to implement tab display for Video Archive

Students have told us that they really value being able to access the recordings of the lectures, but we know they are struggling to find what they need on Moodle. While it is tempting to leave the recordings on Moodle in the way they automatically appear, it often forms a barrier for students looking for a particular session. They either must look through long lists of videos with unclear names, or keep jumping between BB Collaborate sessions to find the one they need.

This video will show you how to turn your lecture recordings into an engaging and visual video archive in five easy steps.

For an accessible version of this video with captions and chapters click this link

6. How to use folders to clean up your page

One simple trick to group resources and declutter your Moodle pages, is to add documents into a folder, like how you would do on your computer. The following video will show you how to add a folder to your Moodle page.

For an accessible version of this video with captions and chapters click this link

7. How to add highlights and indents to make content clearer

Visual clues make sites easier to navigate. Consider using indents to give the page a visual structure. Then add highlights to section headers to make it even clearer. This video will show you how.

For an accessible version of this video with captions and chapters click this link