Stefan – bdecent

Design Challenge: Create an amazing course with Designer

31. March 2022 by Stefan

Creating courses in Moodle is arguably one of the most important tasks a course designer respectively teacher has to do. And while Moodle provides a massive toolkit to do so, making it visually appealing is not as easy as it should be. We’ve built Designer to change this fundametally. Our mission is to enable any teacher to create a course that looks and feels great. The first weeks after launching version 1.0 have been amazing for us, feedback is super positive and we’re very thankful for all the ideas, feature requests we’ve received from customers, partners and the whole Moodle community. Today, we are launching a design challenge: We’re challenging you to create an amazing course in Designer. Here’s how you can participate: Sign up for an user account on labs.bdecent.de (unless you already have one) Add a new course in the category “Designer Challenge” Create something amazing Enrol the …

Video Time 1.5 released

21. March 202219. March 2022 by Stefan

The new release of our Video Time product family brings a number of much anticipated improvements: Tab interface Interactive transcripts Support for subtitles and captions in global search Do not track support for enhanced privacy We’ve also improved the overall code quality, updated all libraries and used APIs to the latest version and implemented a modular architecture for more tab types.

Create a kanban board with Designer 1.2

11. March 2022 by Stefan

We’ve recently released our new course format Designer and feedback was super positive, which we are very grateful for! Today, I want to give you a sneak peak at one of the features we’re working on at the moment: Kanban board. Moodle courses are not only great for learning, they can be used for many other usecases. Probably the most popular one so far is a “community”. Using the course as a container for one or several forum activities, a course can essentially bring together employees, students and project teams to discuss anything and everything. Moodle.org relies heavily on this, and it works great! There’s one more use case which we think makes a lot of sense: courses as projects. In core Moodle, roles can already be renamed locally in a course, so the non-editing teacher could become a “project mentor”, students can become “project members” and the teacher the …

Learning Tools 1.0 is now officially approved on moodle.org

2. March 2022 by Stefan

Our latest plugin Learning Tools is now officially approved and available in the plugin directory. We have built Learning Tools as the foundation for all the little (or not so little) things that students and teachers are missing in moodle courses. Inspired by many great apps, and Google’s material design system, all tools can be accessed using the floating action button (the so called fab). It’s simple, intuitive, a well-know interface element and perfect to provide context-based tools all around Moodle. In the first release the following tools are included: Bookmarks Create a bookmark to the current page Notes Create a note for the current page Focus Mode Click to show only the content of the page (hides header, footer and sidebars) Schedule Click to create a calendar entry for the current page — “Learn later” If you haven’t done so already, give it a try on our demo site …

Mix and match your course layout with the Designer plugin

31. March 202214. February 2022 by Stefan

If you teach with Moodle, it’s quite likely you use a variety of content – perhaps some links to websites, some resources for reading and some assignments and quizzes for actively involving your learners. Perhaps you use one of the standard Moodle course formats, such as the Topics or Weekly format. Or perhaps your organisation has installed course format plugins in Moodle which allow you to display your content in different ways, making it more appealing to your classes. Whichever format you use, until now it has only been possible to have one type of layout per course. But what if that restriction were removed? What if within the same course, you could select the most appropriate layout for your content? Mix and match! This month’s featured plugin is a course format called Designer, developed by Stefan Scholz (whose other contribution Kickstart we’ve featured before in this series) which enables you to do just …

Designer won “Reviewer’s choice” award

14. February 20227. February 2022 by Stefan

Our Moodle course format Designer has received the reviewer’s choice award (again, we already won it for Kickstart and Restriction by section completion) for bringing new UI and UX concepts. We’ve built Designer to allow teachers to build amazing courses. Usually, all activites in a Moodle course look very similar. While they have different icons, there is no obvious distinction between important or mandatory content and (optional) resources. With Designer, teachers can choose different layouts per section. If you want to see Designer and Designer pro in action, have a look at our Designer Tutorials course. Or create a test course and try it out yourself!

Designer 1.1 Pro now available

14. February 202223. January 2022 by Stefan

We’re thrilled to announce that Designer 1.1 Pro can now be ordered here on bdecent.de. For those that do not know our brand new course format, here’s a quick recap: Designer is a super versatile course format which is compatible with recent versions of Moodle (3.9 – 3.11). It features three different layouts for sections: list, card and link layout. Each section can have its own layout, allowing teachers to build unique layouts. Each activity is displayed with the all the relevant information: activity title and icon, an expandable description and a visits counter and a unified completion badge. In Designer 1.1, we’ve introduced collapsible sections. Teachers can configure the initial state (expanded, collapsed, first expanded) and turn on accordion mode. The section progress is displayed next to the section title. Designer Pro has of course all the features of Designer Free, but comes with several great features: The circles …

Dash Pro 1.2 now available

23. January 202219. January 2022 by Stefan

The latest release of Dash is now available. This update includes the following improvements: A new data source for badges The courses and completions data source now provide a course image which is linked to the course A customisable fallback course image if no course image has been added to the course The grid layout now supports background images for each grid item (e.g. a course or a user) The admin can configure a redirect to a specific URL when users try to access /course/index.php We’ve created a demo course which shows many different configurations; you can find screenshots of most of them below. Grid of courses (one per page with pagination) Accordion of courses by category Grid of Video Time activities in selected courses Two dashes using two figure layout Grid of users in same group Grid of users with filters Grid of completion data with background image Table …

Video Time 1.5 — Release Candidate now available

21. March 20227. January 2022 by Stefan

We are thrilled to announce that we’ve made the release candidate of Video Time 1.5 available today. It’s a significant update from the previous version and comes with great new features.

Designer 1.0 — test our new course format now!

14. February 202224. December 2021 by Stefan

Without doubt, Moodle’s has a lot to offer when it comes to learning activities. From pages that can contain multi media content to assignments with powerful grading workflows, from highly interactive content (h5p) to easy to build feedback forms, teachers can choose from a variety of tools to create collaborative and diverse courses.

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