What should your next Moodle course look like?

You have the best course content, sleek e-learning packages and amazing facilitators. But your Moodle course is still struggling to engage learners. The problem may lie in your UX / UI design.

As an open-source learning management system (LMS), Moodle is a terrific pocket-friendly option for education businesses of all sizes. However, being open-source also means that it does not automatically arrive in a shape that packs a punch and makes you go ‘wow’! Of course, it is highly customizable with its plethora of plugins and the myriad options to tweak its settings. However, even after spending hours on end, you inevitably end up with course pages that have the quintessential (read age-old) 3 columns, multiple blocks (yes, there is a pun on the word here), and the scroll of death if you are very generous with the activities and resources you provide your students with. Chances are, if you are doing what most learning designers and Moodle administrators do, you are always staring at a finished course page like this.

And that is what your students are doing too. Staring at it. And then heading off to the modern web –  clean, attractive and intuitive – the web that is designed for them.

Well, the good news is that you can design Moodle course pages that look like they belong in the modern web. And better still, you do not have to be a graphic design or web coding geek to achieve this. And no, you don’t have to break your bank either by outsourcing the work to a Moodle partner or a third-party vendor. Here’s the recipe for spicing up the learner interface of your next Moodle course.

Step 1 – Stop thinking about your course as Moodle course. This will remove the creative block designers often face when conceptualizing the layout for their Moodle course.

Step 2 – Find a responsive Moodle theme. There are many professionally-designed themes available for purchase. Explore themeforest and themecaters for some really cool modern designs. Theme prices usually range between USD 40 and 60 either for one-off or annual licenses. One of my favourite themes from themeforest is Lambda.

Step 3 – Install the new theme. The new theme you have purchased needs to be installed on your Moodle server so you can apply it to your new Moodle course. Your IT administrator can help you with this.

Step 4 – Customise the new theme and the new course page. Most new themes allow self-customisation (check before buying). For instance, in Lambda, you can define new colour schemes, remove header size limitations, use a 2-column grid layout instead of Moodle’s traditional 3-column grid, add/hide blocks, and use specialised blocks such as image sliders.

For a modern website-like look and feel pick a 2-column grid with blocks on the right, display only one section on the course main page, add only one label activity to the main page, embed linked tiles to other activities through this label activity, and use specialized blocks intelligently.

That’s it. Of course, with any recipe a little bit of creativity can go a long way. So, put those thinking caps on and think of creative ways to customize your course using your new theme. If you need some inspiration, you can always check out the demo version of the theme you have purchased and read more about it to see what is possible.

With some inspiration and creative vision, you should be able to achieve a Moodle course page that looks nothing like a Moodle page. This is a course page layout I was able to achieve.

So, get creative and give your next Moodle course the facelift you have always desired.

Need more ideas or help with this? Reach out to me via your comments here or send me a LinkedIn message.