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The Filtered course list block for Moodle displays a configurable list of a user's courses. It is intended as an alternative to the My courses and Course overview blocks, though it can also be used in conjunction with either of them. It is maintained by the Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (CLAMP).
Users enrolled in multiple courses find it increasingly difficult to navigate a large Moodle site. A student in a four-year college taking eight courses per year might be enrolled in thirty-two courses before graduating, and the situation for faculty can be even worse, especially when they teach several iterations of courses whose full names are identical. We have sometimes heard the course-navigation problem cited as one reason for running yearly Moodle instances, but that is a lot of technical overhead to solve a navigation issue, and it leaves you with a bigger problem: Now users have to navigate across multiple instances. An institution may well have other reasons to run yearly instances, but one of the goals of the Filtered course list is to take the navigation problem out of that equation.
The Filtered course list undertakes to address the navigation problem using four organizational principles: grouping, ordering, disambiguation and foregrounding.
Grouping is perhaps the most important aspect of the Filtered course list. The idea is to put courses together that belong together for some reason that is relevant to the user. Moodle's Course overview block, for instance, groups courses into "In progress," "Future" and "Past" based on the course start and end dates. That may suffice for your needs, but there are some limitations you might want to overcome. For one thing, the "Past" grouping will eventually become quite large, and it's not inconceivable that you might want some way to break the past courses into smaller groups. For another thing, relative time references are not always unambiguous. During the time between semesters while building courses and taking exams, for instance, users may well regard both the upcoming and recently concluded courses as current. Finally, you may just want some other principle of grouping: by subject matter, for instance, or by educational level or administrative purpose. Or maybe you want more than one block so that you can apply more than one of these principles. The Filtered course list allows for multiple blocks and provides considerable flexibility in the number and type of filters you apply.
Once courses are grouped, you will probably also want to order those groups. One ordering principle might be to put the most relevant group first. This is certainly the idea behind the Course overview's ordering of "In progress," "Future" and "Past." The Filtered course list provides considerable control over the ordering of groups. It also allows for the sorting of courses within a group.
Course full names in Moodle do not need to be unique, and in practice multiple iterations of a given course often have identical full names. Grouping and ordering only partially alleviate this ambiguity. A broad category like "Past" can easily contain multiple identical course names. By allowing an arbitrary number of categories the Filtered course list offers additional options for disambiguation. Beyond that, we provide options to include disambiguating information (such as short name or parent category) in the display text for course links.
When several course groupings are available it can be helpful to provide emphasis on the most relevant groups by exposing them first. Beyond ordering, there is the question of immediate visibility. In the Course overview block, for instance, the view defaults to the "In progress" panel. The other groupings are readily available, but initially hidden. The Filtered course list allows you to determine which groups are expanded or collapsed by default, and you are not limited just to one.