Improving Moodle: Strategies with Links & Resources

This is a new series, dedicated to how educators can improve their Moodle sites.

When it comes to getting student's to click on things (sometimes referred to as 'engagement') it can often be a hard sell. The structure and the layout of a Moodle site plays a factor, but more importantly is how that link is being sold to the student.

Checkout the below video from the NNGroup (Nielsen-Norman, user experience specialists) to find out some principles to consider when linking to content.

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The advice given is good to consider; particularly around labeling of links. 

Some of you may have noticed that when I send emails with links - I try to highlight entire sentences that say what links are:

Click here to access the guide on Moodle lesson

instead of just a single word:

Click here to access the guide on Moodle lesson

This is both for clarity (ie. when scanning the document, a user will look for the specific information) but also to increase the 'click target size' so that the user isn't struggling to press something very small.

Related to this, is how resources provided for download are named.
If you are providing a document on the impact of tax reforms for small business in Australia it is a good idea label the file something meaningful; for example, you might call it: 

TaxReforms-ImpactSmallBusinessAustralia.pdf

Oftentimes people will just upload the PDF they created (default is often "binder1.pdf" via Adobe Acrobat) or the file they downloaded themselves (eg. "tax_reform_aust-100921.pdf").

This is important, as many students will be either organising the provided files, or potentially leaving it in their 'downloads folder'; so giving it a meaningful name to begin with assists the students in their ability to find the right file at the appropriate time.

This also means you can refer to the file by name and students will know what you're talking about, and access the correct file; this is assuming the students haven't renamed the file - but, again, if it has a meaningful name to begin with - they're less likely to need to rename it.

If you're wondering about the suggesting naming, it is using what's called Camel Case. This is a way of naming things without using punctuation marks or spaces. Some browsers and operating systems have limits on character length, or too many spaces in document names; by using Camel Case you can assist the user by eliminating any possible issues with long file names.