Moodle dashboard, course block drawer, and notification notes

Students can customize their Moodle Dashboard to help them find assignments and be informed of upcoming work.


Many students do not realize that they can customize their own Dashboard. 


To customize the Dashboard the student enables the Edit mode at the upper right side of the page in the desktop/laptop view of Moodle. 



With the Edit mode enabled, the student can Add a block to the Dashboard.



To move a block click on the four way arrow in the upper right corner of the block. To delete an unwanted block, click on the three dot vertical ellipsis menus at the upper right. Move and the three dot menu are only visible with Edit mode enabled. When done, turn off the edit mode. 

While users control their own Dashboard blocks, the blocks drawer in courses is controlled by the instructor.


By default the block drawer shows only the Activities block. 


Students are not all aware of the course block drawer. Although open by default, the student may have closed the block drawer early in the term and left the drawer closed. Some students were found to be unaware of the Open block drawer icon. And if the drawer is left in the default configuration, there may not be a compelling reason to use the drawer. 



In edit mode an instructor can add blocks that are pertinent and relevant for their course. Students will see the blocks that instructors choose to add. Upcoming events is useful for providing information on upcoming due dates for assignments in the course. 



Some students have learned to use the notifications to access feedback, others have not. A look around a classroom this morning saw many notification counts of 80 or more, with many above 100. With some notifications simply reading the notification in the drop down list is sufficient without having to open the notification. This leaves behind many unread notifications. 


More than one student did not know how to bulk clear the notifications. Clicking on the check mark at the top of the list of notifications causes all notifications to be marked as read. This will clear the unread notifications count. 

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