Ready At Hand Teaching Resources - Moving Towards A Single-Page-Application In Moodle

In contemporary education, learning management systems (LMS) play a pivotal role in facilitating teaching. Moodle, a widely used open-source LMS, offers a versatile platform for educators to manage courses, engage with students, and utilize plugins from the open-source community. Moodle provides educators with a range of resources (e.g., readings, slides, videos, links.) and interactive activities (e.g., quizzes, assignments, forums.) to create courses, provide course content, and facilitate communication and collaboration among students.

Challenges persist as educators rely on a combination of Moodle with many other platforms e.g. MS Teams, Kahoot, Miro and Google for communication and learning resource provisioning. Moreover, students prefer platforms such as Facebook and Discord for communicating with peers. However, this fragmentation results in students juggling multiple browser tabs or programs, losing the in-course context, and facing increased difficulty in navigating the learning materials especially in large courses. Educators tend to limit their use of Moodle activities to forums and assignments, and provide content through Moodle resources like text and media areas, URLs, and folders. The usage of many instances of few types of resources and activities requires scrolling from students and teachers, which can lead to decreased engagement and cumbersome navigation for students.

To address these challenges, we implemented a single-page application design, and expanded the course design process made by Suyao Hu by adding a step, focusing on the structure and navigation in the course. Based on the Generico filter plugin, we created a customizable solution with less loading, as most content can now be accessed without loading new pages or tabs. The filters create new design options for creating course structures that minimize scrolling.

Our Generico templates enable educators with a few clicks to embed third-party tools, e.g., Miro, Microsoft OneDrive/SharePoint, Google Drive for file editing and viewing, forms, and video. Students can view the embedded teaching materials (e.g., presentations) on Moodle’s main course page and can switch them to full-screen. Teachers can edit the presentation depending on the embed settings, either directly in the course or through a link, providing a single point of access. Embedding third-party tools that allow multi-user editing (e.g., Google Slides), directly on the course page, lets students collaborate e.g., on exercises and teachers can monitor their progress.

Five educators with different Moodle experience completed a set of five tasks in a pilot test set in a Moodle tutorial room. The five tasks included:
(1) changing the course format and
(2) creating a Panopto embed in a test course while finding relevant information in the Moodle tutorial room. Using the tutorial room to find
(3) the forum activity,
(4) Quiz information and
(5) using expandable sections.

The overall unassisted completion rate was 79%, and the debrief showed good usability and suggests a potential for incorporating SPA design principles and utilizing plugins like Generico. The tutorial room provided inspiration for educators, and opened a forum for discussion.