A Moodle developer meeting took place yesterday and the roadmap for Moodle 2.3 was discussed. Moodle 2.3 is poised to be released in June 2012 or thereabouts. I rejoiced when I read “Usability is the real big thing for 2.3. We really want to focus on it.” in the meeting minutes. It seems as though the developers at Moodle HQ are now happy with the core set of features and are eager to focus on the user experience....
In a survey I conducted in December 2010, it became apparent that students prefer courses which are nicely laid out (no surprises there). Many a teacher who uses Moodle will have come across the Scroll Of Death issue (I won’t use the acronym for that one!). For those unfamiliar with the problem, it is when you have many resources on a Moodle course, and it makes it difficult for users to navigate the course, thus ending up scrolling up and down endlessly....
I am heavily testing Moodle 2 to see whether it is suitable for our needs. I often reset my Moodle 2 sandbox to its original state and therefore need to re-upload users for every refresh. While there are some tools to generate users, I prefer to have a CSV file at the ready to not add any more time than I need to an already boring task. I created a Moodle user CSV file that contains about 110 bogus people and quite a few fields already completed....