Moodle block which provides all functionality of block_course_overview, provides additional filters to be used on university campuses as well as the possibility to hide courses from the course list
This plugin has reached end of life.
This plugin is not actively maintained anymore for Moodle versions beyond 3.7. Please consider to replace it with block_myoverview in Moodle core.
This plugin requires Moodle 3.7+
Moodle installations on university campuses have certain constraints which are not completely supported by Moodle core and the course overview block in Moodle core. We implemented this course overview block to accommodate these needs as much as possible while keeping the features from the original course overview block from Moodle core as much as possible as well.
Install the plugin like any other plugin to folder /blocks/course_overview_campus
See http://docs.moodle.org/en/Installing_plugins for details on installing Moodle plugins
After installing the plugin, it can be directly used by users and can be added to the Moodle dashboard and to the Moodle frontpage.
Initially, it behaves like block_course_overview from moodle core. Additionally, courses can be hidden from the course list.
To make use of the advanced features of the block, please visit: Site administration -> Plugins -> Blocks -> Course overview on campus
There, you find multiple settings pages:
On this settings page, you can change the block's title which is shown in the block view (multilang strings are supported, see http://docs.moodle.org/en/Multi-language_content_filter for details).
On this settings page, you can change the appearance of the course overview list, especially if the course's full name or short name should be displayed in the course overview list entries. Additionally, you can enable and style the displaying of some meta data in a second row of the course overview list entry and you can define if courses in which the user has a teacher role are listed first in the course overview list.
On this settings page, you can enable (default) or disable the system for hiding courses from the course overview list.
On this settings page, you can define which roles in a course will be displayed besides the course's name as teacher and get listed in the teacher filter.
On this settings page, you can activate and configure a filter which enables your users to filter their courses by parent category. As soon as the filter is activated and the setting is saved, the filter appears in the block view.
On this settings page, you can activate and configure a filter which enables your users to filter their courses by top level category. As soon as the filter is activated and the setting is saved, the filter appears in the block view.
On this settings page, you can activate and configure a filter which enables your users to filter their courses by teacher. As soon as the filter is activated and the setting is saved, the filter appears in the block view.
On this settings page, you can activate and configure a filter which enables your users to filter their courses by term. As soon as the filter is activated and the setting is saved, the filter appears in the block view.
The parent category filter is filled with the main category of each of the user's courses.
Example: If the course's category path is Category A -> Category B -> Category C -> Course, the filter will contain an entry with Category C.
The top level filter is filled with the top level category of each of the user's courses.
Example: If the course's category path is Category A -> Category B -> Category C -> Course, the filter will contain an entry with Category A.
As described in the "Usage & Settings" section of this file, you should configure the teacher roles for block_course_overview_campus according to your campus needs. After that, block_course_overview_campus takes each course member with one of the configured roles. These teachers are filled into the teacher filter.
As described in the "Usage & Settings" section of this file, you should configure block_course_overview_campus according to your campus course of the year. After that, block_course_overview_campus maps each course to a term by looking at the course's start date. This term is filled into the term filter.
block_course_overview_campus is used ideally as sticky block and placed on your frontpage (and / or Dashboard page).
See http://docs.moodle.org/en/Block_settings#Making_a_block_sticky_throughout_the_whole_site for details about sticky blocks
During the development of Moodle, there have been added several features added to the moodle core block_course_overview and moodle core which would conflict with block_course_overview_campus functionality. It has been decided to disregard the following Moodle features for this block:
- In block_course_overview in Moodle 2.4+, a user is able to sort his course list by drag and drop. We decided to not adopt this feature for block_course_overview_campus because we think this would conflict with the filtering / hiding feature and confuse users. In block_course_overview_campus, the course list remains sorted by full course name.
- In block_course_overview in Moodle 2.4+, a user is able to limit the length of his course list with a block setting. We decided to not adopt this feature for block_course_overview_campus because we think this would conflict with the filtering / hiding feature and confuse users. In block_course_overview_campus, the course list always shows all courses which have passed the selected course filters.
- In block_course_overview in Moodle 2.4+, the administrator can configure the block to show Metacourse children. We decided to not adopt this feature for block_course_overview_campus because we have no need for this. If you need this feature, please let us know on https://github.com/moodleuulm/moodle-block_course_overview_campus/issues
- In block_course_overview in Moodle 2.4+, the administrator can configure the block to show a welcome message. We decided to not adopt this feature for block_course_overview_campus because we have no need for this. If you need this feature, please let us know on https://github.com/moodleuulm/moodle-block_course_overview_campus/issues
- In Moodle core since Moodle 2.2+, there is a setting "courselistshortnames" which controls the displaying of course names. This setting is also processed in block_course_overview. We decided to ignore this core setting and to stick to block_course_overview_campus's internal course display control settings.
- In contrast to the Moodle core block_course_overview, this block doesn't support MNet courses and wasn't tested with MNet Moodle installations.
Since the release of Moodle 3.2, Moodle core ships with a shiny new theme called "Boost". While Boost does many things right and better than the legacy theme Clean, it also has some fixed behaviours which don't make sense for all Moodle installations. One of these behaviours is the fact that the mycourses list in the nav drawer (the menu which appears when you click on the hamburger menu button) is non-collapsible, always contains all of my courses and can hardly be configured by administrators.
We have created local_boostcoc as a companion plugin to block_course_overview_campus which does its best to add support for filtering and hiding courses to the mycourses list in the nav drawer. local_boostcoc is published on http://moodle.org/plugins/view/local_boostcoc and on https://github.com/moodleuulm/moodle-local_boostcoc.
This plugin is developed and tested on Moodle Core's Boost theme. It should also work with Boost child themes, including Moodle Core's Classic theme. However, we can't support any other theme than Boost.
This plugin also provides a fallback for browsers with JavaScript disabled.
This plugin is published and regularly updated in the Moodle plugins repository: http://moodle.org/plugins/view/block_course_overview_campus
The latest development version can be found on Github: https://github.com/moodleuulm/moodle-block_course_overview_campus
This plugin is carefully developed and thoroughly tested, but bugs and problems can always appear.
Please report bugs and problems on Github: https://github.com/moodleuulm/moodle-block_course_overview_campus/issues
We will do our best to solve your problems, but please note that due to limited resources we can't always provide per-case support.
Due to limited resources, the functionality of this plugin is primarily implemented for our own local needs and published as-is to the community. We are aware that members of the community will have other needs and would love to see them solved by this plugin.
Please issue feature proposals on Github: https://github.com/moodleuulm/moodle-block_course_overview_campus/issues
Please create pull requests on Github: https://github.com/moodleuulm/moodle-block_course_overview_campus/pulls
We are always interested to read about your feature proposals or even get a pull request from you, but please accept that we can handle your issues only as feature proposals and not as feature requests.
Due to limited resources, this plugin is only maintained for the most recent major release of Moodle. However, previous versions of this plugin which work in legacy major releases of Moodle are still available as-is without any further updates in the Moodle Plugins repository.
There may be several weeks after a new major release of Moodle has been published until we can do a compatibility check and fix problems if necessary. If you encounter problems with a new major release of Moodle - or can confirm that this plugin still works with a new major relase - please let us know on Github.
If you are running a legacy version of Moodle, but want or need to run the latest version of this plugin, you can get the latest version of the plugin, remove the line starting with $plugin->requires from version.php and use this latest plugin version then on your legacy Moodle. However, please note that you will run this setup completely at your own risk. We can't support this approach in any way and there is a undeniable risk for erratic behavior.
This Moodle plugin is shipped with an english language pack only. All translations into other languages must be managed through AMOS (https://lang.moodle.org) by what they will become part of Moodle's official language pack.
As the plugin creator, we manage the translation into german for our own local needs on AMOS. Please contribute your translation into all other languages in AMOS where they will be reviewed by the official language pack maintainers for Moodle.
This plugin has not been tested with Moodle's support for right-to-left (RTL) languages. If you want to use this plugin with a RTL language and it doesn't work as-is, you are free to send us a pull request on Github with modifications.
Since Moodle 3.4 core, PHP7 is mandatory. We are developing and testing this plugin for PHP7 only.
Ulm University Communication and Information Centre (kiz) Alexander Bias
This plugin is an enhanced version of Andrew James' block_course_overview_plus (https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=block_course_overview_plus) which was enhanced to fit the needs of university campuses.