Alternatives to SCORM

This is the third post in my serious exploring the need for education providers to move away from using SCORMs, the others being:

• The inconvenient reality that we should stop using SCORMs
• How do organisations strategically move away from SCORMS?

These two previous posts have proved to be extremely popular with lots of discussion taking place in LinkedIn, and lots of good comments and what is really interesting, is there appears to be huge amounts of support for the notion of moving away from SCORM, and not many people countering that idea.

My initial intention with this post, was to identify some advantages and disadvantages of certain alternatives, but having reflected on the many comments that the first 2 posts received, I realise there is a huge risk in me doing this as originally planned, so have changed tack slightly.

The risk here, is that even if people agree with me, and decide to move away from SCORM, many will simply find an alternative technology to replicate the same behaviour – e.g. an authoring tool, that is relatively easy to use, and allows for an entire course to be constructed and packaged together as a single html based package that is then uploaded to the VLE. This may be slightly better than a SCORM option (e.g likely to be more accessible), but we would still have many of the horrors that I listed in the first post and we would be missing an opportunity here, and that opportunity is to properly challenge ourselves and what we are doing and to come up with something creative.

I really want there to be shake-up in this area of work – there is too much stale and low-level gimmickry going on at the moment (and because it is the norm, many don’t realise how bad it is, and how much better it could be). I would like to see an empowering of the educators to have a greater say in what goes into a course, and be more proactive in the actual running of courses once they are live. There are lots of courses out there that are teacherless (e.g. almost all compliance training – I have blogged about the problems with this before), and even the ones that do have teacher involvement, the actual content has been created by someone else and isn’t changeable – all that the teacher does is mark a few assignments, contribute to discussion forums and answer gripes from students when they are struggling. This isn’t the most enjoyable form of teaching, and we risk losing good teachers if we continue with this style of education.

In my previous post, I argued that the most fundamental step an organisation needs to make, is to move away from SCORM – if this is achieved, then whatever is chosen as an alternative is probably a step in the right direction, and as such a better alternative (even if we don’t get it 100% right first time). I have always believed very strongly in the importance of accessibility, and to me this should be forefront in the decision making process. So, the way forward has to be clean html, with intelligent use of CSS modifications and possible elements of Javascript to make things behave in a certain way. How we get this end point, will vary from situation to situation, and it requires organisations to identify and work with people that can help them make the right decisions. Many of the projects that I support has Moodle as its VLE, and uses the built in Moodle tools for creating the content and activities. In order to improve the appearance of some of the content, I have created different elements (eg ways of laying out content) by adding in bits of CSS, and then creating a ‘crib sheet’ that contains the necessary code that the course creators simple copy and paste (and then update with their information). This allows people with relatively basic technical skills to construct things that look good, work well and are reasonably accessible – and what I am finding in these situations, is the content creators are really enjoying the development process, and their imagination is starting to run and they are coming up with ideas of ‘would it be possible to’ or ‘what would be really great here is if we could…’ and becomes a driver for continual improvements in the content.

Each organisation that I support (which is usually between 15 and 20 at any given time), will have a slightly different approach to exactly how we achieve the above, but almost all use a combination of different options, rather than a single one size fits none approach. I have listed below the 3 main options that I use, including some key advantages and disadvantages of each, but I have to reiterate – we must not just pick another authoring tool and simply copy and paste the content out of our SCOM packages, and replicate the same behaviours – we must use this opportunity to change and improve what we do.

Using the built-in tools of the VLE

Most VLEs have very comprehensive sets of tools allowing for content to be created directly within the VLE itself. Moodle in particular is exceptionally good at this, and by doing so (and if done well) we create the most seamless experience for the user, as well as something that should work on all screen sizes, have reasonable levels of accessibility and very significantly be easy to update/re-purpose as times goes on.

Advantages

• No extra cost or hassle with software licenses
• High levels of accessibility
• Should work on small screens
• Easy to maintain/repurpose

Disadvantages

• Would probably require a lot of training/support for people to learn how to use properly
• Ties the organisation to that particular VLE
• Some VLEs – the tools are not as well developed as others

Using Xerte Online Toolkits

If an organisation desperately wants to use an authoring tool and not build directly into the VLE, then Xerte Online Toolkits is a consideration. This is an open source project that has been around for many years, with one of its major selling points being the accessibility of the output. This is based on a series of pre-created page ‘templates’ for different forms of layout/interactivity type, and there are various forms of output that can be used. The software itself is free, but would require someone to set this up and host for you (which may be internal or external).

Advantages

• Affordable solution
• Once an organisation has set up Xerte, there is no limit to how many people can use it
• Output is highly accessible
• Easier/quicker to learn than other authoring tools
• Doesn’t tie an organisation to a particular VLE

Disadvantages

• The only way that interactions created within Xerte can be tracked, is if the Xerte is exported as a SCORM file, which defeats the purpose of what we are trying to achieve here. Therefore any interactions (e.g. results from quizzes etc) cannot be tracked within the VLE.
• The ‘source’ files need to be carefully managed – especially if lots of people using the same system, otherwise can lead to problems with version control, duplication etc.
• Xerte is a 3rd party system, which although well established and maintained by an active community of volunteers, there is no guarantee this will always be the case.

Using H5p

H5p is a suite of interactive elements where the output is created in clean html5 format (hence the name). If your VLE is Moodle then H5p is incorporated into the core set up, making it very easy to use. In the past H5p had the problem that the grade from an activity was always taken from the last attempt by the student, not their best attempt – this prevented it from being usable in any sort of summative manner, however this problem is resolved in newer versions of Moodle, as long as the core method of using H5p is used (e.g. creating the activities within the content bank, and then deploying from there).

A list of all the activity types including examples can be found at https://h5p.org/content-types-and-applications

Advantages

• Easy to use
• Output is clean, and often looks better than the tools built into the VLE
• Accessible
• Works well on small screens
• Doesn’t tie an organisation to a particular VLE

Disadvantages

• Some of the interactivities are too simple – e.g. the quiz mechanism within H5p, is a long way short of the power that standard VLE quizzes should have
• Some of the interactivities are gimmicky and have little pedagogic value – important for an organisation to either remove these completely, or train staff in the uses of the different tools
• The editing interface is not always that easy to use
• H5p works well with small bite size activities, it isn’t as good for packaging an entire course into a single item
• H5p is a third party tool, which although free at the moment, there is no guarantee that will always be the case

Image Source: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/meadow-path-panorama-680607/

How do organisations strategically move away from SCORM?

In my previous post titled ‘The inconvenient reality that we should stop using SCORMs‘ I presented the case for why we have to move away from using SCORMs. In this post, I will try and unpick how this could happen.

The first (and a really important) step, is for the organisation to fully and genuinely accept that SCORM is no longer fit for purpose and that it has to be replaced. This may sound absurd – but if I went into a board room and declared that I have created a new format for online learning content, however, it doesn’t work well on small screens, isn’t good for accessibility, is a dog to maintain and keep up to date, etc. I would get booted out without hesitation. So if we choose to be analytical about what we are doing, reaching the conclusion that SCORM is no longer suitable should actually become a formality. I recognise that this will be a seismic change for many, and especially for those that have been perpetually told that SCORM is the industry standard and therefore the way to go, they will then have doubts over who to listen to – and this will probably be the biggest challenge to overcome.

If an organisation can successfully navigate the first step, the following steps are actually easier. One approach, is to make the decision that any new content/courses will be built using non-SCORM techniques, so the existing SCORMs will stay for the moment, but when they reach the end of their natural lives, they will also get replaced with non-SCORM options, and as such the SCORMs will get gradually phased out over the next 5-10 years. The other alternative is to fast-track the above, by creating a timetable to actively renew and replace the existing SCORMs so the phase-out takes place much quicker e.g. 3-5 years.

The next step is to look at and choose the alternative(s) – and this is a really good opportunity to evaluate and challenge what and how you are doing things. One of the problems with SCORMs is they generally have no human communication elements built in. As a former teacher, I very much believe that the underpinning principle of education; is the interactions between student and tutor, and student and their peers. By moving away from SCORMs, we can re-introduce these elements and in doing so create a better quality education experience. Yes, I am aware that doing this requires paying a teacher somehow to take part in these interactions and to monitor the peer-to-peer communication – which many organisations won’t want. This can be a relatively low cost (albeit a constant background one) – but it would make for massively superior quality education experiences.

Another opportunity this re-think gives us, is to allow the tutors to use their imaginations and be more creative again. Online courses are often resource orientated – e.g. lots of resources, and self-check quizzes in a pre-determined order and then the occasional token discussion activity. An alternative approach is to make courses be discussion orientated – e.g. the tutor initiates and maintains discussion activity with the students, and at the appropriate points in time (e.g. when things come up in the discussion thread) the tutor releases the relevant resources and activities.

There will be some significant HR issues to deal with. If you have people employed who are SCORM creators by trade, these will need to be re-trained, and if any are resistant to such changes, then ultimately they would need to be moved on, which does come with a significant cost both in terms of time and finance. If you out-source the content creation, then at least that is easy to negate – you simply change who you outsource to, or look at bringing the development back in house.

My advice (as it often the case) is to seek external help to guide you through the above process. This is one of those areas where there is no ‘one-size fits all’ solution, so each organisation will need a bespoke solution developing, and getting that right will be key. If there is a need to retrain staff internally, then don’t cut corners in this area – that will just be a false economy. Get the right training model in place, and give the attendees the proper time to engage in the training and then the support to practise what they have learned.

I am not going to pretend that this will be an easy journey (otherwise more organisations would have followed it already) – but it is an inevitable journey that needs to be undertaken. The longer that organisations delay making this change, the harder it will ultimately be – those that bite the bullet sooner, will have an easier transition and will benefit from the rewards for longer.

In my next post, I will describe some alternative approaches to using SCORM, and the associated advantages and disadvantages.

Image source: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/question-mark-labyrinth-lost-maze-2648236/

The inconvenient reality that we should stop using SCORMs

I have been writing this blog post on and off for the last 2 years, but up until now have not had the confidence to publish – as I expect what I have to say here, won’t sit comfortably with many, and as a freelancer, labelling yourself as a potential heretic isn’t always deemed as good business sense.

However, the well respected and really experienced Dan Marsden recently published a similar post titled ‘SCORM Expert: Stop publishing new SCORM content‘ which has spurred me into finishing off this series of posts, as I believe the education and training sectors really need to have this conversation.

Dan’s post goes into a bit of the history of SCORMs, which I won’t repeat here – but the underlying message is that the SCORM format is about 20 years old and created for a completely different era – most notably, the iPhone/iPad hadn’t been invented at the time, and as such SCORM didn’t need to consider the potential for small screens, touch access, and people learning whilst mobile.

There are many issues with the SCORM format:

• Once you have set up and used a SCORM item in a course – to make any changes to this is really tricky.
• If you don’t manage and keep the source files that create them, they can become impossible/very expensive to update.
• SCORMs don’t work well on small screens
• SCORMs are generally not good for accessibility
• SCORMs work best when there is a good internet connection. If accessing on a poor connection or one that dips in and out, the learner may think they have completed something, but (due to the lack of connection at the time) this information may not be fed back to the VLE – this causes all sorts of problems, with students getting frustrated at having to redo things they have already completed once in order to complete a course.
• SCORM files are large – this has an impact on the VLE hosting (you need a slightly bigger server) but has an even greater impact on a learner who if accessing via mobile data, can eat into their monthly allowances.

The big question

Given the above list of horrors, why is SCORM still so widely used and effectively the industry standard? The simple answer is that it is too easy to just follow suit and not challenge the Status Quo. If an organisation doesn’t have the finances or resources to create their own learning content, it is very easy to outsource this to someone else – and there are lots of individuals and companies out there, who make a living by taking your raw content and converting it into a SCORM for you. It is this behaviour that has allowed this out of date format to perpetuate for so long, and when something is the industry standard (as SCORM is), it takes a lot of confidence and a real depth of understanding to call out against this standard – most managers (and freelancers) don’t have this level of confidence or wisdom.

The better alternative

Having established that the SCORM format is not fit for purpose, what is the alternative format? This is easy to answer; well written and clean html is the best alternative – which if using a VLE like Moodle, can easily be achieved by building the content directly using the native functionality – e.g. an appropriate combination of Pages, Books, Lessons, Forums, Quizzes, Assignments etc. maybe with a few H5p interactions as appropriate. Doing this overcomes all of the problems listed above – but it does take longer to do well and requires more skilled people to do this (which in turn increases the cost). It does also present the risk of tying you to the platform which is one of the arguments that have been used previously in favour of SCORMs, but hopefully by now, organisations will know which platform they have and be confident it is there for a few years to come. This approach does make it harder to outsource the process to external people – as you either have to give them direct access to your system to build directly in there, or they have to build in their own systems and then export/import into yours which can be slow and not always 100% reliable.

The drivers for change

One of the big drivers for change here could be accessibility. Lots of education providers will have these wonderfully worded (but sadly hollow) disability statements declaring how they don’t discriminate – and then they produce content in SCORM format – which just the process of opening can be an accessibility challenge for many, and once in – unless really well produced can be very hard to access via a screen reader, and many won’t work with the various inclusion tools available to learners.

I was horrified when WADA (the educational organisation responsible for the fight against drug taking in sport) recently updated their content (spending big bucks), and switched from Moodle based content to what can only be described as truly horrid and totally inaccessible SCORM based content – and a significant number of their users will be para athletes. When I discussed this with WADA – they weren’t very interested in my assessment of the situation, and told me they had employed a consultant who had advised them to go down the SCORM route for accessibility reasons! So a large global organisation like WADA was duped by a low quality consultant, misguiding them, and the mistake wasn’t realised until too late. This mis-understanding contributes to the SCORM issue, and I expect many other education providers have been badly adivsed by consultants to follow the well-trodden path, rather than create your own.

I was speaking with a colleague who for a living creates SCORMs using a widely used rapid authoring tool. The creators of this tool claim that the output can be made to be accessible – but to do so takes a lot of time and skill which most people won’t have (and it stops the tool from being a ‘rapid authoring tool’). When my colleague speaks to clients he offers them a basic rate for content creation, and then a higher rate to make the same content in a fully accessible format – his higher rate is typically 10 times that of the basic rate, as that is how much longer he reckons it takes him to make something fully accessible.  Unsurprisingly he doesn’t get many takers for the accessible versions, and I expect most people out there producing SCORMs don’t even know what they need to do to make things accessible, let alone have the time/inclination to do so. So just because the companies who make and sell these tools tell you that the output can be accessible and can meet various technical accessibility standards, does not me than it will.

Have we been here before?

If some think that what I am saying is ridiculous, then I only have to look back to the early 2000s when Flash was everywhere – learning content was being built in it, and even entire websites were flash based. These were totally inaccessible so I quickly came to the conclusion that Flash wasn’t suitable and we needed to stop using it. I came up against huge resistance back then (some organisations had entire teams of flash developers) and was given a hard time for suggesting something so outlandish. It took longer than I expected and we are grateful to Apple for forcing the issue but thankfully, Flash did disappear, and we were able to move forwards as a result. I hope/believe that we are at the same situation with SCORM. I know there will be resistance, the companies that make these tools are not going to like this, the companies that produce ‘off the shelf’ compliance training will struggle, and there are thousands of people whose main and only skill is creating content in this format who will have to retrain to update their skills. It also forces people to decide which beds to lie in – I personally went down the Moodle path, others will choose Blackboard, or Canvas or will choose other non-SCORM tools such as H5p or Xerte to specialise in – obviously people may choose the wrong path to follow, which will be a concern, but it will favour those who are adaptable and open minded.

Conclusion

SCORM will disappear at some point – the very nature of it, means the standards cannot be significantly changed, so it is currently on a slow and painful journey towards its own obsoletion, what I don’t know is how long that will take. Will it be slow like the demise of Flash, or will it be more rapid like the redundancy of film cameras, VHS or DVDs. I expect that I will be having these conversations with clients for at least the next 5 probably 10 years – but what I do know, is that the organisations that make the step forwards to move away from SCORMs sooner, will find themselves ahead of the game when the inevitable final happens.

In my next post, I will unpick some of the more practical steps of how to start this change in direction.

Image source: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/grim-reaper-death-scary-creepy-5535651/

#Moodle Tricks of the Trade – Adding your own CSS to the Moodle Mobile App

This is the 21st entry, in the Moodle Tricks of the Trade series.

Moodle comes with a mobile app (that is free for the users to download), and when set up correctly is a very useful addition to the service being offered. What people are probably not aware of, is the fact that it is possible to add your own custom CSS to the App to change the appearance of it. This may be simply to add in corporate styles, or it may be to add in additional items – e.g. flexboxes that have been added to the main site, and you want to replicate in the app.

In order to be able to do this, you need to have a ‘Premium’ plan, and there are 3 ways to get such a plan:

1. If you are hosted by a Moodle Partner, then you will have this for free.
2. You can pay an annual fee – details are available at https://moodle.com/solutions/moodle-app/
3. If you are a charity, NGO or similar – then you may be eligible to get this for free: https://moodle.com/faq/we-are-an-ngo-or-a-non-profit-organisation-do-we-need-to-upgrade-and-do-we-need-to-pay/ (note that Universities, Colleges, Schools etc. are not eligible for this).

Once you have a premium plan, you can change a couple of settings in the Moodle admin (see the video), you then need to identify a location to store your CSS file, for ease – I have chosen to use git-hub, to which I can start adding the required CSS.

Normally when adding your own CSS to Moodle, one uses the ‘Inspect’ tools in the browser to identify the different classes etc. We cannot do this directly in the app, but if we download Chromium and use that (following the instructions carefully) we can emulate the app in a browser which in turn allows us to inspect what is going on, in order to find the relevant code that is required. Instructions on how to do this are covered in https://moodledev.io/general/app/development/setup/app-in-browser and are summarised in the video.

Since this post was originally written, things have changed, so we have to use a version of Chromium that is older than version 119 – this took me ages to resolve, as everything was trying to get me to install the latest version of chromium, eventually I found a way by going to https://chromium.cypress.io/win64/canary/117.0.5917.0 and using the mini_installer.exe file, which appears to be working.

Once Chromium has been opened correctly (pay attention to the details in the video) – you can visit https://latest.apps.moodledemo.net/ – enter the address of your Moodle and login.

One annoyance is that for the CSS to have any effect in the Chromium browser, you do have to clear the cache and history and reload the site. On the actual app itself, if you go to the 3 dots in bottom right-hand corner and then ‘App settings’ – there is a synchronisation option, which allows you to re-synch the site, which would pull the latest version of the CSS file down.

I am not going to pretend that it is either easy or quick to make the changes, but it is doable. One additional annoyance is most CSS works in both Apple and Android but some elements are specific to Android, with different code required for iOS – the Chromium browser will yield the Android code, but not the iOS code – I am still trying to find out how to locate the iOS equivalents of the code, if I make a breakthrough and find that, I will update this post.

UPDATE: Since writing the post originally, and recording the video, I managed to work out how to overcome the issue with Android and iOS being different. If you have an item that looks like ‘.sc-ion-label-md-s h3’ the ‘md’ part of this refers to Android. So all we have to do is add a second item swapping md for ios – so my CSS looks as follows:

.sc-ion-label-md-s h3, .sc-ion-label-ios-s h3

Thanks to https://www.cabi.org/ for allowing me to use their site in the video.

#Moodle Tricks of the Trade – Formatting the description box within activities

This is the 20th entry, in the Moodle Tricks of the Trade series.

I often hear people grumbling about the appearance of Moodle, and I agree that some of the ‘out of the box’ interface isn’t as well developed as it could be – but the good news is that there is quite a lot that we can do with some simple CSS additions, to change how things look. This may be just to bring things in line with corporate style guides, but it can also be to make things clearer.

One thing that I have started to do with some of my Moodles, is apply some basic formatting so the contents of the ‘Description’ box for any activity is changed to make it stand out a bit more. This video shows how to go about this, and the better you get at CSS the more you can do with it.

Note: that the code used for Moodle 3.x will be slightly different to the code used in Moodle 4.x  so if you are still on Moodle 3 and you do this, when you upgrade to Moodle 4 you would have to tweak your code for it to have an effect.

---

#Moodle Tricks of the Trade – Synchronising groups when using course meta-links

This is the 19th entry, in the Moodle Tricks of the Trade series.

There is a well-known and widely used feature in Moodle called Course meta-link which allows you to create a connection between one course and another, so anyone enrolled on the first course automatically gets enrolled on the other. However, what this standard function doesn’t do is allow for the groups of the parent course to get carried over to the child course, which is annoying, as that is a feature that would often be desired.

Luckily there is a way to do this, by using a 3rd party plugin called Meta-course group synchronization – once this is installed on your Moodle, you can get it so that the groups are pulled through from parent course to child course, and any changes to the groups (e.g. groups added, deleted, or membership changed) will get updated within seconds.

There are 2 things that one has to remember when setting this up for it to work:

1. The child course needs to be set up to allow groups (e.g. either set to separate groups or visible groups)
2. When you then add the course meta-link it will ask you which group to add them to – this has to remain as ‘none’ which in doing so is the trigger for the meta-group synchronisation to take effect.

On one of the Moodles that I support we have a highly modularised delivery – with different programmes being made up of different modules, many of which being shared across the programmes. When I add students and tutors to the main programme course and put them into a group, the students, tutor, and group all move seamlessly into the various modules that make it up.

Considerations when upgrading to Moodle 4.1

Many organisations that use Moodle will probably be using Moodle version 3.9, 3.10 or 3.11, and they will hopefully be aware that the jump to Moodle 4.0 or 4.1 is a significant jump. Moodle 4.1 is what is called a long term supported release, so there would be no sense in anyway upgrading to Moodle 4.0 at the moment, they may as well go straight for Moodle 4.1

Anyone who was involved in Moodle when we changed from version 1.9 to 2.0 will remember that was a huge change that caused a lot of people a lot of stress. The good news is that the jump from 3.x to 4.1 is no way near as big as that was – but it is the biggest upgrade jump we have had since then – so it does need to be taken seriously and in particular enough resource and time needs to be allocated to it.

Moodle 4 has been redesigned to create a better user interface and experience – the consequence of this, is certain things will look very different, and more significantly the way that a course is navigated will be different, which may require some reworking of the courses, to get them to work within the new ideology. For example some course themes that work in Moodle 3, will not work on Moodle 4, or will work differently, and some 3rd party plugins, also won’t work – in which case alternatives for them will need to be sought.

I was recently involved in a webinar (video from this is below) on this topic in conjunction with Overt Software Solutions Ltd where they explained some of the technical aspects of the upgrade, before I came in after about 10 minutes to discuss some of the front end Moodle admin considerations.

The key thing is to get the timing right for this. I expect that a lot of traditional educational organisations (certainly UK ones) will use the Summer break to carry out this upgrade, in which case they need to be starting the process now. One of the key parts of testing, will be getting the teaching staff to check their own courses, and this is the bit that people need to think about. When I was a teacher, I had a healthy allocation of holiday days per year – but I was limited as to when I could take them – which meant I had to take a big chunk of my annual allocation as a 5 week block in the summer, and this was the same for most other teachers – so there is no point in waiting until the middle of July before getting teachers to test things, as they will either be on holiday, or about to be on holiday and not interested in this side of things. Connected to this, is the marking load for the teachers. This will vary from course to course, but typically teachers will experience periods of time in the summer term when they have ridiculous amounts of marking on their plates, and no slack to do anything else – these weeks also have to be avoided. The bottom line therefore for many organisations will be that they probably need to have a ‘teacher testing’ window of about 6 weeks, probably starting by early May at the latest (ideally earlier) – which if we count the time backwards from this date, means we need to be starting the process in the next few weeks at the latest, in order to have time to do this process justice.

#Moodle Tricks of the Trade – Making the Country or City profile field compulsory

This is the 18th entry, in the Moodle Tricks of the Trade series.

In Moodle, the standard profile fields for Country and City, are not set as compulsory, and there are no built-in settings to change this. If you do want to make these fields compulsory (or other similar fields) then this can be achieved through the clever use of a User profile field plugin called Associated input.

Once installed, you then add a new user profile field, connect it to the original one that you want to make compulsory, and that is it.

One thing to note, is if you have users who haven’t yet chosen something for this field – when they next login, they will be forced to update their profile before they can continue. This isn’t a major problem, but worth letting people know about this in advance, to avoid confusion.

And finally – this is quite a significant change in the way the system works, so please test this on a test site before deploying to a live installation, and I have no idea if and how this will work in future versions of Moodle – it definitely works in Moodle 3.9-3.11, but I haven’t tested this yet in Moodle 4

#Moodle Tricks of the Trade – Adding a QR code block to a course

This is the 17th entry, in the Moodle Tricks of the Trade series.

If you are likely to be teaching in an environment where the learners are accessing the Moodle via mobile devices – one of the challenges is giving the students instructions on where to go to locate certain activities. One way to speed this up is by using QR codes so if you want the learners to go to a certain activity, you create a QR code for that item, the students scan it with their phones, and subsequently go straight there.

There are a few QR code plugins available for Moodle, but none did exactly what I wanted, but then I realised that I could do exactly what I want using the excellent ‘Filter Codes‘ plugin.

Once this is installed and enabled by the site admin, and filter codes is turned on within the course, I can add a new block – in older versions of Moodle this will be called an HTML block, in Moodle 4 they have renamed this to an ‘Editable text’ block.

I am then going to add to Filter Codes elements into the block.

The first is the {thisurl} element, which will display the URL of the current page. I then put this inside the QR code elements:

{qrcode}{/qrcode}

So the final code looks like:

{qrcode}{thisurl}{/qrcode}

This very simply will display the URL of the current page as a QR code. I then apply the desired settings to the block (e.g. make it so that it appears on all pages in the course, and give it a sensible name), and decide if this is visible to all, or just teachers.

This block could actually be set up at site level by an admin, so that it appears throughout the entire Moodle.

#Moodle Tricks of the Trade – Ways of tweaking YouTube embed code

This is the 16th entry, in the Moodle Tricks of the Trade series.

In the previous post in this series, I introduced the idea of using videos in Discussion activities. In this post, I will introduce a couple of ways that if you are using YouTube, you can tweak the embed code to either change the appearance or change the behaviour of how the video plays.

This video was recorded in January 2023, note that YouTube is forever changing the way that embed code works and behaves, so at some point in the future these tweaks may not work.

The tweaks that I introduce are:

1. Adding a border to the video
2. Changing the ‘suggested videos’ that show at the end
3. Specifying a start time for the video
4. Specifying an end time for the video
5. Applying multiple elements (e.g. doing a combination of the above)