Join the dots

As if the Moodle Plugins Review wasn’t enough, I’ve decided to do some more short videos of what I’m calling ‘Moodle Obscurities’, which could also have been called ‘little things in Moodle that I stumbled across by accident and that cold have made my life easier if I’d known about them earlier’. The first of these shows how to cut down the length of a Moodle navigation bar (sometimes called the ‘breadcrumb trail’) to remove what some can see as a superfluous link, removing a potential source of confusion for students. In a default implementation of Moodle, the navigation structure that is shown to teachers and students within a course will be something like:

<SiteName>-<CourseName>-<ContentType>-<ContentName>

ContentType in this scenario is (for example) Resource, Forum or Quiz, and some will argue (as they have done with me in the past) that this link is superfluous and confusing to students, and can I please remove it. Thanks to Moodle, the answer is yes, provided you know where the configuration setting is hidden to switch it off. This video gives a quick explanation of the problem (not that it is really a problem, its more of a preference thing) and how to customise it for your Moodle site. Enjoy!

Rejoinder – I should also mention in these posts when there are requests in the Moodle Tracker to make improvements, and in this case there is a request to allow users to add a topic or a week into the breadcrumb trail – you can vote for this change on the Moodle Tracker.