JoomlaLMS Navigation

[rfrazee]

JoomlaLMS has a lot of useful functionality, but one of the things that I have seen with our users and also with other people in this forum is the usability from a navigational perspective is difficult. I have seen a lot of ideas about how to fix it, bigger icons, customizable location, etc.

Working with some of our users and a number of usability consultants, one of the things that may be happening is that we are being inconsistent with how we ask our users to navigate the site.

When a user comes to a website, they navigate through the site using the navigation, as defined by the website owner, or the designer of the website. The user learns to navigate, and find the information they need based on that navigation structure.

Then, when they decide to take a course with us, the user has to learn a new type of navigation (the JoomlaLMS navigational Icons), which in most cases, does not match the design or layout of the navigation of the site. This can cause a user to not feel the site is simple to use. As a site is perceived to be more complicated to use, the interest in studying with that site decreases.

Please don´t get me wrong, the JoomlaLMS navigation seems to be well thought out. But, it also seems to be done in a relative vacuum, and not really related to the rest of the site navigation.

That leads me to the question: Does it make sense to allow the JoomlaLMS navigation to be "published or unpublished" and create an option for a navigational menu that takes the form of the website´s navigational structure?

Maybe there is a solution to do exactly this, but I haven´t found it yet. If anyone knows how to accomplish this with the current JoomlaLMS tools, please let me know.

[edukator]

In your site menu you can add links from the LMS and add them there through Joomla.

ive done this for a few of the links for my students, ie. Learning Path

You can disable the links from the LMS menu and that should work.

[rfrazee]

Edukator, thanks for the info. I have a couple of questions:

1) Do you have more one course?
2) Do you have more than one learning path?

We currently have 4 courses, and we are adding 3 more. A student can take any of the course. Did you have to hard code the learning path address, or were you able to reference the learning path of the student? I can't hardcode the courses into a menu since depending on the user, their menus may be a bit different.

The specific menu items that I would like to be able to have are:
1) JoomlaLMS Homepage, which we call our homeroom,
2) A Link to each of the courses in which a student is enrolled. Since we have one learning path per course, we can just make the user go straight to the learning path.

These are two specific menus we would like to have access to at this point, but the other menus might be useful as well.

[aef03]

I have to agree with the first comment. Things like:

*) Inconsistent use of icons - Cancel Icon Means "Delete" (instead of "X" icon), Checkmark Icon means "Next" (instead of "Arrow" icon).

*) Many unnecessary leading pages in learning paths - each page of the heirarchy has to be clicked through - making users wonder what's going on - when are they going to get to the activity.

*) "Contents" of a learning path are not automatically expanded.

I abandon learning paths due to the above - since I am mainly leveraging the system for quizzes, I am simply going to have people pick the proper quiz and trust them not to work ahead.

I think the navigation should be transparent to users - most of my users will only ever use the system during a single one week class - so having to learn navigational foibles of the system is very distracting.

I think web design and usability is paramount in any site - but in an elearning site it is super-critical because you want users to be able to focus on content, not on how to get the system to do the tasks they need it to.

There is an excellent book called "Don't Make Me Think" by Steven Krugg on these exact elements of website design. I have given a copy to open source projects whose software I use. I would be pleased to pay for a copy for JoomlaLMS - just drop me your address.

D.

[Andrew]

These are some valid points. The LMS is versatile and this is the problem when designing courses that are simple to use.

As edukator says you can turn off the icons and then add the links to content, but really for simple courses (e.g. SCORM, quiz, evaluation and certificate) you want this on one page. ELF will respond to this and make improvements.