{"id":2898,"date":"2014-05-06T21:58:44","date_gmt":"2014-05-07T05:58:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=2898"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:02:26","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:02:26","slug":"navigating-the-treacherous-waters-of-the-lms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2014\/05\/navigating-the-treacherous-waters-of-the-lms\/","title":{"rendered":"Navigating the treacherous waters of the LMS"},"content":{"rendered":"

A student wrote me last week asking when the extra credit is due in her class. Since I had put the due date next to big red letters as a label in Moodle, I told her the date (of course) and asked if she was able to see it at the site. I sent her a screenshot to be (a bit impatiently, I admit) helpful:<\/p>\n

\"extracreditdue\"<\/p>\n

She replied, thanking me and telling me she hadn’t seen it because she uses the “list on the left”. Confused, I asked what she meant. To me the screen looks like this – no list on the left.<\/p>\n

\"myscreen\"<\/p>\n

It turned out she is using the Navigation menu<\/strong>, which I have docked on the left side. I never use it.<\/p>\n

I looked at it and noticed it didn’t have any of my labels, just a list of the Moodle activities that have links:<\/p>\n

\"MoodleNav2\"<\/p>\n

Here’s that week as I designed it, in the center column, the main page:<\/p>\n

\"Moodlecenter2\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0Notice that my labels, which have the due dates, are not in the Navigation menu<\/strong><\/em>. This prompted me to tweet:<\/p>\n

\"loststudenttweet\"<\/p>\n

The Navigation menu, which surely more than one student is using,\u00a0cannot be removed<\/a>, even if I were running my own installation, which I’m not.<\/p>\n

So here is where the technology forces me to change my method, and messes with my design. These things are due every week on the same day. I have the labels to mark them clearly, and they are convenient to replicate throughout the class. They also set a clear pattern, like a calendar.<\/p>\n

But if students are using the Navigation menu, and I cannot stop them, my method is poor, and it would be better to put the dates in the description of each activity, or at least have “Due Tuesday” in the title of the activity.<\/p>\n

However, what happens when I have a reading assignment from a book? I have one class coming up this summer where I am using a textbook, because I haven’t yet edited a satisfactory version of my Wikipedia-based textbook<\/a>. So my Moodle page looks like this:<\/p>\n

\"103Moodlepage\"<\/p>\n

The lectures<\/em> will appear in the Navigation menu, because they will be linked. But students will not be able to see the reading assignment<\/strong><\/em>, because it is a label, because there is nothing to link it to — it’s a real, page-ridden textbook. To fix this, I’d have to create a page for each reading assignment, which is likely what I will have to do.<\/p>\n

Students will also not see my introduction to each week’s material. \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n

Hours await me of removing labels I had painstakingly created for five classes, and making activity pages for things that are not activities, all because students are using a Navigation menu to navigate. Super.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A student wrote me last week asking when the extra credit is due in her class. Since I had put the due date next to big red letters as a label in Moodle, I told her the date (of course) and asked if she was able to see it at the site. I sent her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cmslms","category-online-teaching","category-pedagogy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2898"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9909,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2898\/revisions\/9909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}