Usability issues - Category titles

Adjust the number of course per page of the course listing

Of course this is totally possible; however, it is a setting listed under front page settings which does not seem to me to be the most intuitive place for it. I would expect it to be somewhere under courses but the argument could be made that you really only browse courses from the front page. Everywhere else you are in a particular course. In any case, this might be a neat area to explore using AJAX.

How does Moodle handle long lists?

There are several ways used to handle long lists:

• # of entries per page: depends of the configuration
• ways of sorting: cronologically, alphabetically or both
• ways of filtering: cronologically, alphabetically, by key word, by role, by duration, by group, by course and by participants

Comparison of the various long lists (courses, students, participants, questions, etc.)

Table

Comparison of the various long lists

ID	Name of the long list	# entries per page	Index	Sorting	Filtering	Are the differences justified?
1	Courses		style="background:yellow;" None (although hierarchy is possible through metacourses)	Chronologically	General serach (it is possible to search courses by name)	Indexing: it is not strictly necessary to index the courses alphabetically mostly because course hierarchy is possible (thanks to metacourses). However, it would be useful indexing by hierarchy (the name of the first level of the hierarchy). Sorting: in some cases could be useful to sort alphabetically (specially when the number of courses is really big) or for teacher that don't know how to use metacourses functionality and lots of courses at added at the same time. So sorting aphabetically could be a desirable option. Filtering: the filtering of courses is really poor. Courses should be filtered by teacher, by group or by date of creation.
2	Students		None	Alphabetically without limiting the number of entries (both students and courses)	Role and general search	Filtering: Perhaps it would be useful to filter students alphabetically and by group (specially when the number of courses is really big) Indexing would reduce usability as the enrolement would be more complicate, so it is better not offering this functionality.
3	Participants		Chronologically by number(by default) and alphabetically	Chronologically by number (by default) and alphabetically (every page has a limited number of participants per page)	By course, by group, by period, by role	Filtering: perhaps it would be useful to have a general search so participants could be searched per name / surname.
4	Questions		Chronologically by number	Chronologically by number (it must be considered that there are several possibility to visit the questions / answers: threaded view or nested view)	General search (and the most advanced search is possible: content, author, date, forum)	Filtering: It would be useful to search by group (several groups can be associated to a course)
5	Recent activity		None	By activity name (theme) and within the themes by date. Can be ordered by course or date.	Participants, activity and date	Indexing and filtering: it would be more usable if there would be some indexing. This would be indexing chronologically by name (1 day ago, 1 week ago, etc.) when sorting by date is selected; and indexing by hierarchy (the name of the first level of the hierarchy) when it is sorted by name. Moreover, it would be useful to filter by group.

Screenshots

Courses

Students

Participants

Questions

Recent activity