Why I Hate Moodle
Or at least my university’s implementation of it.
Let me begin with two assertions about what I see as the strengths about the nature of the web, so that people who see things another way do not need to bother themselves with either reading further or in arguing with me.
The first thing I want to note about the web is something I, and thousands of others, have observed in countless other ways and places and that is that the web is the platform without parallel for the delivery of content. Let me emphasize content, which I do over and against the delivery of an experience. The content itself may involve the user (or viewer or reader or listener) in some kind of experience, but the web itself is less about the delivery of experiences.
The second thing I want to observe about the web reveals my age: the web is at its best when it is semantic, when the way content is structured is part and parcel of its meaning. And I mean semantic in a deep sort of way, with UX/UI at the surface but reaching all the way down to <tag>s.
So, let me walk you through the way Moodle is set up at my university and you can begin to understand why I think its anathema to the promise of the web. And we can begin with the way I begin, which is to click on a link to a course that I am teaching in order to manage some aspect of it:
There are two things that I find difficult to accept with this: first, the content, the actual content of the course, is squashed between a whole lot of navigation and other matters that amount to little more than unnecessary cognitive overhead. Sure, I could customize the interface to get rid of all the extraneous blocks, but I use the default setup because it’s what I see most, if not all, of my students using and their experience of the course is my concern. If I design things based on my tweaked-out setup, and those things do not look the same for them, then I have failed them.
The second thing seems obvious to me: I’m a teacher. I’m coming to Moodle to do things, but in order to do things I have to click a button. And I can’t tell you the number of times I have scrolled down the page to start something only to realize I have to scroll back up, click on the edit button, and, then, scroll back down to the section I want to edit and click on the Add an activity or resource button.
And speaking of too much scrolling and clicking, when you do click on the Add button, you are greeted with the following pop-up:
Congratulations if you want to add one of a dozen of Moodle’s “activities” designed, one supposed to “enhance the educational experience” — because what undergraduate doesn’t want to use Hangman, or a Hidden Picture!, to learn about speciation or topic modeling? So more scrolling in order to get to ways to add actual content: URLs, pages, files, etc.
Perhaps the most fundamental, the most basic form of content there is is a web page. Setting aside that this web page is a column squished between a whole lot of other material, if you attempt to paste it into a text box, your formatting options look like this:
Forget meaningful things like H1 headings or passages of code, because you aren’t getting them here. For a while, if you dug deep enough into Moodle’s bowels you could enable a Markdown filter, so that you could write and maintain pages as semantic plain text, but they have moved that switch around so much that it’s clear they don’t want you to write structured prose, just roll back to the 1980s and WordPerfect for DOS and stick to one-off formatting of text.
Moodle is ugly, takes too many clicks to do anything meaningful, and it undoes everything that was once semantic about the web. Which is kind of like Facebook, which I guess makes sense.
Originally published at johnlaudun.org on February 1, 2019.
