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Moodle 4, for me, was even more complicated to use than Moodle 3. But I'm blind so it may be better for sighted people. I have to edit and create courses, so I'

Moodle 4, for me, was even more complicated to use than Moodle 3. But I'm blind so it may be better for sighted people. I have to edit and create courses, so I'm not the usual blind person that just has to go through a course as a student. Honestly if I could just hook up courses to some kind of Git repo and edit things as folders and files, I'd be happy. The closest we've gotten is setting up a Github Pages repo and setting a lesson URL to the lesson on github, so I can just push changes to Github and it'd change in Moodle. But Moodle wants you to know the lesson is a URL, so shows it in an embedded frame. Also I never could get it to where I'd recieve emails when a student finishes an assignment. I could get it to work on individual lessons sometimes, but I have like 5 to 10 courses I manage. I ain't going through all that.

fock 3y ago
in my opinion Moodle is the epitome of PHP crapware, which most of us thought had been banished a long time ago... It's kept afloat by predatory and relatively inept consulting businesses which advertise the weird (to me...) idea that every course needs an externally "developed" (aka coded in PHP) module and the teacher has no agency over how that will be structured. Case in point: I had a course and wanted to publish my excel-grading-sheet to a moodle course: 1) there is hardly any documentation on how to do that... 2) from the one paragraph I pieced together the primitive XML-spec. Now people had the points for their work. 3) it would be nice to give people a total of points? BUT: there is no way to do that nicely - I was presented with a formula editor (including: trigonometric functions...), where I could put together individual exercise ids BY HAND (summation with regex might be more useful than trig, no?) 4) students complained: I handed in the tasks and don't have points yet 5) turns out: the XML-parser they use stops at UTF8 and the person who coded that thought: "hey, we print 'import successful' and just stop the import at the specific entry we couldn't handle, partially updating the DB" Also there is of course no API of any sorts (so automation is impossible...), which is no wonder if your development is stuck at .php-files intermingling code and html...
- thrixton 3y ago
  TIL, moodle has not API, cross that off my list of software I’d ever recommend, thanks.
Blagus 3y ago
Being sighted doesn't help with Moodle. Once, my college updated it to some then-new version with completely different interface (plus some custom college-branded CSS) and something didn't work right in one of the courses. I've had the misfortune of peeking into the lecturer's side of it, and there were four of us trying to decipher how to change some simple setting. I think it was time-limited visibility of an assignment with file upload or something like that. Something that shouldn't have taken four of us (including the lecturer) over 5 seconds to figure out. When I think about it, most options related to time-limiting something, or quizes/tests, were so complicated for most of them that they would hack around it by reusing the same items, expiring them in 2099 and then (I guess) manually changing visibility for those present in the room. Then all hell breaks loose when they didn't update the questions correctly and you get like 0% for all correct answers, or they get the results for all 1500 people who ever attended the class, then they manually filter it out for current-year students. Often, our tests would begin like "Do you see it in the Moodle? No? And now? And now? OK, now? Now? Still nothing?". This was on an ICT college where you'd expect more computer savvy people. But even there, the problems were happening too often to be able to blame users. It's just awful UX.

fock 3y ago

in my opinion Moodle is the epitome of PHP crapware, which most of us thought had been banished a long time ago... It's kept afloat by predatory and relatively inept consulting businesses which advertise the weird (to me...) idea that every course needs an externally "developed" (aka coded in PHP) module and the teacher has no agency over how that will be structured. Case in point: I had a course and wanted to publish my excel-grading-sheet to a moodle course: 1) there is hardly any documentation on how to do that... 2) from the one paragraph I pieced together the primitive XML-spec. Now people had the points for their work. 3) it would be nice to give people a total of points? BUT: there is no way to do that nicely - I was presented with a formula editor (including: trigonometric functions...), where I could put together individual exercise ids BY HAND (summation with regex might be more useful than trig, no?) 4) students complained: I handed in the tasks and don't have points yet 5) turns out: the XML-parser they use stops at UTF8 and the person who coded that thought: "hey, we print 'import successful' and just stop the import at the specific entry we couldn't handle, partially updating the DB" Also there is of course no API of any sorts (so automation is impossible...), which is no wonder if your development is stuck at .php-files intermingling code and html...

thrixton 3y ago
TIL, moodle has not API, cross that off my list of software I’d ever recommend, thanks.

Blagus 3y ago

Being sighted doesn't help with Moodle. Once, my college updated it to some then-new version with completely different interface (plus some custom college-branded CSS) and something didn't work right in one of the courses. I've had the misfortune of peeking into the lecturer's side of it, and there were four of us trying to decipher how to change some simple setting. I think it was time-limited visibility of an assignment with file upload or something like that. Something that shouldn't have taken four of us (including the lecturer) over 5 seconds to figure out. When I think about it, most options related to time-limiting something, or quizes/tests, were so complicated for most of them that they would hack around it by reusing the same items, expiring them in 2099 and then (I guess) manually changing visibility for those present in the room. Then all hell breaks loose when they didn't update the questions correctly and you get like 0% for all correct answers, or they get the results for all 1500 people who ever attended the class, then they manually filter it out for current-year students. Often, our tests would begin like "Do you see it in the Moodle? No? And now? And now? OK, now? Now? Still nothing?". This was on an ICT college where you'd expect more computer savvy people. But even there, the problems were happening too often to be able to blame users. It's just awful UX.