Moodle

This is my fault from MDL-13112.

The thing is, I do not think it makes sense ordering by sortorder when the courses are taken outside of their categories.

As you loose the category hierarchy it would mostly not make much sense. The benefit of alphabetical order is that at least there is a consistent ordering which can be followed all the time.

(he says, then looks at your screenshots which show that alphabetical ordering doesn't work). Hm

Alphabetical does seem to be happening OK in the my courses block screenshot (isn't it?), but its awkward having it that way. My courses are all together as they all start with A, but when students (in secondary school) are doing 10-20 courses, courses from different categories will all be jumbled up. I agree that alphabetical ordering would not help you find things easily etc, but this also applies within categories. Teachers all name their courses in different ways and many start with the exam board code e.g. "SC105 - Electricity and magnetism", whereas many others would not e.g. "Electricity revision course", so alphabetical listing separates courses from their logical neighbours and makes them harder to find.

I think the best solution would be for My courses to be the same as 'all courses', including category titles and manually set sort order, but without the courses a person is not part of. That way you can find your courses by looking for categories. If there was an option to have all but one category automatically collapse using javascript like Urs Hunkler's Accordion theme a while back, that would help even further with preserving real estate.

Hi, here is a patch that stops the "My courses" block sorting the courses differently from the main page. If there is an ideal sorting method, it should probably be consistent and altered in the default parameters of the function get_my_courses().

For my particular requirements I would like to be able to set the course sort order manually. My list of courses need to be done sequentially so having them sorted alphabetically actually would confuse users rather than help them.

Given the differing requirements of differing users it might be best to allow Moodle administrators to choose whether to sort alphabetically or manually.

@Matt: The inclusion of categories for "My Courses" isn't always appropriate - depending on how the site is presented e.g. list of courses. Would need ot be an admin config option for the block imo.

@Thomas: Manual sorting, could that be problematic on sites where it's not possible to predict the courses (and their categories) in which users have a role i.e the block's display is user specific.

@Dan: Any plans to review this following the MDL-13112 change. Was something fixed that wasn't broken (for everyone)?.

Ray, yes possibly manual sorting could be problematic. Not sure how technically difficult it would be to give the user control of how their courses display in the 'my courses' block. Maybe the user could choose whether to sort by course enrolment date or alphabetically etc?

Yes, perhaps a user option would be better. Probably not likely in 1.x series, I wander if this could be requested for 2.0.

It appears as though it only takes one line of PHP so that in Moodle 1.94 the course sort order follows the order set by the administrator

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=115793&parent=508050

I find it a little strange that in order to achieve this relatively straightforward task I have had to resort to hacking PHP rather than interacting with the admin interface. Of course I can understand that implementing a solution that allows the user to control this would be be more of an overhead. However, it would be the best approach in terms of making Moodle more user-friendly for teachers who don't have time to plough through the forums looking for and then implementing hacks to PHP!

This thread illustrates how some Moodlers absolutely want courses in the 'My courses' block to sort alphabetically while others do not:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=121572

Minh, has coded the start of a solution to this issue. See this post:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=122236

...based on this request from teachers

Our teachers have asked if it would be possible to rearrange their courses on myMoodle, similar to the way topics can be rearranged in courses. That way they could determine their own order, and have the most frequently used course on top, or the most important one.

We have also have many of the same requests. What is it exactly we are voting for on this one? To have the My Courses block configurable by teachers? If so, I vote yes!

The bug as entered is that the My Courses sort order does not respect the Course order set in Add/Edit Courses. That is what I would like to see fixed. A request for users to be able to change the order of courses here needs to be entered as a separate feature request. Please just fix THIS bug.

We have just upgraded to 1.9.14+ and encountered the same problem - it means that unimportant courses are now at the top of the list in the My Courses block. We would like the option of being able to sort by Category first and then course.

We got around the problem temporarily by applying a pre-upgrade version of the Courses Block to our Moodle site. Our developer did some fiddling to stop moodle complaining about version numbers. It seems to have fixed the problem and the order of categories and courses is maintained in the Courses Block.