Talk:XS Moodle design

This page is full of "moodle-speak" which is not helpful for someone trying to figure out what you are trying to accomplish with the moodle software. My objection to the use of Moodle as the content management system for the OLPC project is that it seems to have no pre-made modules/features that immediately target young children and their classroom needs. This "XS Moodle design" needs to address this directly. BTW it doesn't work to point at random to moodle forums. Most of the K-12 community examples aren't open to inspection by random visitors. Also, Martin, you could benefit by spending a week sitting in the back of a lower-grade classroom, to give you a more realistic grasp of what that environment demands.

Examples from your current text:

"The topics course format needs improvements to support year-long usage."

Could you provide a sketch to show what kind of page you are talking about supplying, preferably with content that might arise in a lower-age classroom? Perhaps your educational consultants could provide such a sketch? I certainly don't know what a topics course format is, and I don't think the reader should have to research this.

Moodle UI is text heavy. CSS might give us just enough hooks to achieve this without a huge patch.

If you mean that teachers will have to edit a css file in order to make content have icons, you are nuts. Teachers are very overworked as it is, since they typically are expected to do assessment and planning outside the school day. They don't have time to learn to be a web designer just to enable kids to interact with a school server. If making teachers modify CSS files isn't what you mean, please refine your description.

XO journal smarts Why not simply place a "turn this in" option when an item in the journal is selected? This makes the process analogous to the non-computer way of doing things, and thus is more familiar and less prone to screwing up.

Customized XS-Moodle Upgrade Path?

• What is the expected upgrade path for this highly customized version of Moodle for the XS server software?
• Will one be able to easily upgrade to future versions of Moodle beyond 2.0, or will it require the latest Moodle build be "ported" to the pared down customized XS version?