Many years ago, when I was teaching at a college, and at the same time responsible for the ILT/e-learning provision within that area, I used to hold regular course rep meetings with students (I would give them a free lunch as an incentive) so that I could find out things about what they liked or didn’t like about the things we were doing. These proved really useful meetings and many things were changed or implemented as a result.
One thing that came up in a meeting, was a student suggested that it would be better if the content on the VLE was displayed in reverse chronological order – e.g. the most recent stuff appeared at the top and older stuff moved down accordingly. At the time I had never seen this done before and the other students thought it was a stupid idea, but I saw where he was coming from, and as services like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, News Feed etc have evolved the norm is for the most recent content to appear at the top of the list and everything else to move down – so it makes sense that the VLE could do the same – if a course is 30+ weeks long, why are we asking the learners to scroll down through content and resources that they covered 9 months ago?
I have tried this technique with a few courses that I have been involved in, and I think it is a better way of working – the only problem was that within Moodle there wasn’t an automatic way to do this, I either had to pre-create my weeks in reverse order and then set the restrict access settings for each week to make them appear at the right time, or I would create the weeks content as I went and would manually drag this topic to the top of the list when appropriate. Neither solution was ideal and not something that most teachers would have the time or inclination to do.
However – whilst searching for something else on the Moodle plugin site I came across something called ‘Weekly format reversed’ a plugin that will do exactly what I want – automatically reverse the course for me. I haven’t tried this yet as none of the moodles that I am working on at the moment want this approach, and looking at the comments it looks like there were a few bugs, but hopefully if enough people use and contribute to this plugin they will get sorted out. This way of working may not work for all people, but is certainly something that is worth trying, and things look very different when viewed the other way up.
If nothing else – this reduces the need for excessive scrolling, which is one of the main considerations when designing a VLE area.
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