Join the dots

Perhaps its just the clients that I tend to deal with, but the vast majority of focus when deploying a Moodle site tends to follow the following elements:

Typical Moodle Process

This is a very ‘course centric’ way of looking at Moodle, and to be fair this is the way that most people I’ve met want to use Moodle, for better or worse. This does however ignore a number of neat things that Moodle can do that are less course-centric and more student or topic centric, which leads us to this episode of Moodle Obscurities.

A learner’s personal profile at a first glance looks like a place to keep some moderately useful information that may or may not be exposed to other users, but in the video below I take a look at what happens when the interests fields in a personal profile are combined with Moodle tag pages to turn Moodle into a community environment rather than simply a container for courses.

I’ll also be following this up with a video on how Mahara can be used to extend the capabilities of Moodle in terms of communities of interest and student-centric learning.

One thing I forgot to mention – a really useful addition to the tags page would be the ability to add an RSS block on the tag topic. This feature is currently listed in the tracker – so get in there and add your vote to get the change implemented.