Bazaar or Bizarre?
Open Source VLE Moodle is an example of Bazzar architecture.
Consider a simple yet crucial feature of Moodle: Notifying participants about new postings.
In early versions of Moodle the choice was simple - email. As of Moodle 1.9 however the following are the ways you can be notified of new forum postings:
- Get alerts via email
- Track unread posts (puts a link beside each forum to unread messages)
- The Recent Activity block
- The Latest News block
- RSS feed
- The MyMoodle panel
Each of these six mechanisms duplciate the functionality of telling the user that there are new forum messages. Moreover in themselves these mechanisms may have configurable options. For instance a user can choose to subscribe to forum email alerts. Upon subscription he/she can choose to recieve a daily digest, weekly alerts or by the minute emails. This is of course if a teacher has not taken away this option and made email alerts mandatory for this forum. Mandatory that is until the student figures out that they can disable the email address in their profile to stop recieving any email alerts at all!
Is this a sympom of Moodle’s development model? Does the left hand know what the right one is doing? Bazaar just plain bizzare?
Moodle is highly flexible. An administrator or teacher can configure their system to do just about anything (well, within reason).
To prevent students from stopping email, use the capability (part of the roles system) called “Enable/disable email” (addressmoodle/course:useremail).
Moodle documentation is fairly comprehensive these days, as are other forms of support (like videos on youtube). See http://docs.moodle.org/
@mblake thanks for the comment.
thanks I did not know that this option was there in roles. I must explore this option.
Agreed Moodle is highly flexible. I am just wondering is there a such thing as too many options?
Do we need both recent activity and latest news blocks?
I know that many students check the ‘recent activity’ block for updates to course materials. E.g. lecturer uploads new powerpoint - ‘recent activity’ block displays an alert, same for new assignments. So I would say yes, both are needed as they perform different functions, even though a news forum post does mean an alert in both the ‘recent activiy’ block and the ‘latest news’ block. p.s. great blog!
Thanks Karen,
Our students often request recent activity block be enabled for those reasons you mention. It is a great feature. I think it even shows teachers when students have uploaded assignments and stuff.
It reminds me a bit of the update streams in facebook and the like. Maybe Moodle should include a feature where you can vote or comment on items from the recent activity stream.
One problem is that it also shows activities you that may be irrelevant (or ones you don’t want students to know about). Every time you modify a file or rearrange things in a course it all shows up in the recent activity.
The real reason I don’t like multiple ways to do the same thing is don’t want to write lots of documentation/training or explain too many features to people i.e I’m lazy
-E