Course format "Page" (or paged)

The page format is a quite old idea originately developped by MoodleRooms, and reworked with Catalyst NZ to cope high level of profesional developement presentation.

The page format allows building structured courses on a hierarchic page organisation concept, juste like parper manuals, organized in sections chapters, sequences and pages. The resulting design is clean, lowers the mental load on each page, alike structured formats as “collapsible sections” or “flexible sections”.

What page format does more, is arranging each page distinctly, with an individual layout, and let freely use activites and blocks the same way (as page widgets).

The page format has very specific enhanced features:

• Overloading a page by a single activity allows to switch from “very editoral” pages to “actional pages”
• Ability to “reuse” same activity instance on several pages (such as recurrent labels, or quizzes) - (with optional core patchs)
• Hierarchical pages structure (PRO version requirement)
• The individualization of teaching “by activity instance” and routable to groups or individual users (PRO requirement)
• Pages reserved for teachers
• Protected pages that even teachers cannot alter, this suits to a high level pedagogical engineering practice with course models.
• Public pages without login (PRO version requirement)
• Page templates (PRO Requirement)
• Clever Course summary provided by related Course Summary block.

• Install Guide (non-trivial)
• Administrator Guide
• User guide
• Technical Guide

• Page building
  • Variable amount of pages
  • Parent and children pages with no depth limit (Pro)
  • 3 columns flexible layout configuration, each page distinct
  • Duplicating a page (full cloning)
  • Page overload by an activity
  • Handles availability restrictions (uses Section level restrictions)
  • Displaying configurable previous/next links for a linear progress path
  • Optional publication of page ref in Course Summary
  • Non logged in access to pages (PRO)
  • Published view (students)
  • Private view (including non-editing teachers)
  • Unpublished pages (editor teachers only)
  • Administrator prohibition of public pages (PRO)
  • Designating Page as Template (PRO)
  • Creating a page using a page template template (PRO)
  • Pre equiped pages when creating a course
• Editing pages
  • Addition of blocks, activities or resources in any column
  • Reuse of an already published activity on multiple pages (needs core patch)
  • Pages reordering view
  • Compatible with our theme driven “polyview” features for activities
• Activity Pool
  • Back pool of course activities (manages published AND non published activities) - alternative to stealth activities in standard Moodle.
  • Activity back pool cleanup feature
• Other
  • Private wiki-style side-discussion pages for each side (PRO)
  • Supports conversion from/to standard thematic format (core Moodle)

When importing activities or bunch of activities from another course, the Page format is unable to assign incomming restored course modules to pages. The modules might be assigned to standard course section as in standard formats, but publishing to a page format course needs additional data. The moodle restoring process does not trigger appropriate events for the format page to guess and build this additional data. Thus imported activites will actually reside in the activity back pool, but teachers will need to add them to pages by their own.

Resulting Page instances will come from existing section and will get their name from the section name. All items attached to standard sections will be published in pages. The section 0 will be used to keep track of unpublished course modules. As a result of the conversion process, an administration page (and relevant section) is added to the course.

As standard formats do not know nothing about blocks to page assignation, the standard section to page conversion SHOULD (not sure it does at the moment), install all blocks on first page and let them display on all pages.

Conversion from page format to standard section formats will necessarily loose information, as blocks to pages assignations make no sense for a standard format. Here are some rules of dumb that the process will follow:

• All blocks from all pages are collected to be added in the resulting course.
• Unpublished course modules will be added to the sectionnum 0 of the course, so they are not “lost”
• Multiple page assignations will only keep the “first” page/section assignation.

see preliminary specifications and thoughts about format conversions

• Page metadata implementation: Page metadata would facilitate more advanced side processing or semantic queries in the set of course pages published in a site.

• Component Type : Course Format
• Name : Page
• Technical name : format_page
• Versions : to
• Old versions : 1.9, 2.2 to 2.6
• Distribution : Public and PRO (TMA)
• Availability : Stable.
• RGDP compatibility : in progress
• Filing: https://github.com/vfremaux/moodle-format_page]
• Rendu: http://demo.formation-enligne.com/course/view.php? id=79&page=856

• Valéry Frémaux on an original development of MoodleRooms: Development and documentation
• Florence Labord : Documentation and illustrations

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