Theme Release V1.3.0 ‘Heimdall’

LMS

Workplace

Released in Q3 2023

The upcoming Heimdall release is set to bring exciting new functionality and enhancements to both Moodle LMS and Moodle Workplace customers who are utilising Moodle V4.

Building upon our strong foundation, we have listened to user feedback and focused on improving various areas of the platform. From new visual elements to improved accessibility and mobile access, these features are designed to enhance user experience and provide greater customisation options.

Supported on version(s):

  • Moodle LMS & Workplace 4.1
  • Moodle LMS & Workplace 4.2

A note from Edd Clementson, Product lead at Titus

The Heimdall release builds upon an already solid foundation by adding new functionality into multiple areas of the platform.

Aside from introducing a new sitewide footer and course banner images, we’ve also added big items such as the ability to change dashboard layouts to better suit your content. We’ve even brought some basic statistics onto the My courses page, so users can quickly see how many courses they’re enrolled in, how many are completed and even how many badges and certificates have been awarded (all toggle-able of course).

We’ve ensured the priority of mobile access and general accessibility has been high, to deliver an improved experience on more devices and to even more users.

As always, we greatly encourage you to provide feedback and submit requests/votes via our portal page, for what you’d like to see next.

With thanks to the team who worked on this release:

Edd Clementson, Product Lead

Connor Young, Developer (Release Lead)

Vitaly Potenko, Developer

Steve, Lead Developer 

Kristian Burgess, Graphic Designer

Dan Hefley, Dev Ops Engineer

New Features

Login page ordering

Introducing a feature to reorder login options, allowing you to prioritise the identity provider for streamlined access. Manual logins are now collapsible, particularly useful for organisations prioritising third-party single sign-on and mitigating confusion.

Theme settings

We decided that we needed to ensure our vast array of settings were organised in a more logical and efficient way… so that’s what we did! In this version all the settings have been moved under more appropriate headings, helping us futureproof for new settings in the future.

Display stats on 'My Courses'

A new enhancement allowing you to display some simple statistics to your users. These can be enabled/disabled on a per statistic panel basis but are our first step in adding further value to this area of Moodle.

Dashboard customisations

Admins can now select custom dashboard layouts on Moodle for enhanced user personalisation. Optimise your page presentation by aligning block sizes with your content.

Course banner images

A well requested feature now introduced are course banner images that should bring a bit more life to your courses. Admins can enable these, choose the height of the banners and also provide a brightness overlay to ensure lighter images will still work with the white course name font.

‘Back to top’ button

Another enhancement that is site-wide is a new setting allowing you to enable a ‘back to top’ button. In long courses or activities with a lot of vertical content, users can now quickly and easily return to the top of the page at the click of a button.

Sitewide footer

New sitewide footer is available. Introducing a range of customisation options.

Mobile access

This update enhances Moodle by Titus for mobile users with a new mobile navigation bar for improved display on different devices. Options and controls are now more efficiently distributed for both Moodle LMS (left) and Moodle Workplace (right).

Accessibility

A huge array of accessibility fixes have been made to ensure we are working toward becoming WCAG 2.1 AA compliant.

Course library refinements

After re-introducing the ‘combo list’ to the main library page, we have made some further styling adjustments to improve the experience of expanding and collapsing categories, without accidentally clicking on category links.

Slideshow & shortcut improvements

We’ve made a number of changes to the slideshow and shortcuts on the site home page to improve accessibility colour contrast and customisation. These changes include: Slideshow title font size; slideshow font colour; image brightness filter

The image brightness filter provides you with additional flexibility to ensure the slideshow text is legible on uploaded slideshow images that are quite light/bright.

When slideshows are disabled, shortcuts are now shown correctly. Previously a slideshow had to be used in order for shortcuts to be displayed correctly. New shortcut settings: Shortcut background colour; shortcut font colour.

 
  • Courses – activity navigation – Within courses, we have introduced the ability to enable next/previous buttons for additional navigation between activities.
  • Moodle LMS Course tiles – We’ve also revamped the course tiles on Moodle LMS. Our course tiles now meet the same standard across Moodle LMS and Workplace. These course tiles will still be affected by chosen settings such as card border radius.

Left screenshot is a Moodle LMS course tile, right screenshot is a Moodle Workplace program tile.

                   

 

  • My courses (Moodle LMS) – Tile overlay options – Another new addition is a setting to allow you to remove tile overlay options (archive and star course) from the course image and move them under an ellipses menu on course tiles.

                   

  • Course activity – breadcrumb changes – A further course improvement consists of newly introduced topic/section links inside activity breadcrumb trail. Previously you could access the course home only by using the breadcrumb trail, but now you can select the topic/section name to be taken directly back to this area. Useful on larger courses in particular but be that not all course formats have specific links to sections so in this instance you’d be returned to the course home.

  • Course activity – activity navigation – To further improve the course navigation experience we have introduced a setting to allow you to enable a next and previous button inside activities. These sit at the bottom left of activities as links to the corresponding activities.

  • Courses – highlighted sections – 2 further smaller improvements consist of being able to now choose the highlight colour for highlighted sections within courses and also a new course activity display setting. The latter setting allows you to control the padding around a listed activity in a course. So if you wish for activities to be listed in a more clustered fashion or to space out activities on the course home, you’ll have the ability to do this.

  • Smaller improvements include:

    • A new setting to control the ‘sitewide body font size’.
    • A dropdown allowing you to select 3 slight block variant displays.
    • We’ve added a few more key system level settings into the admin quick links drawer:
      • Site home settings
      • System content bank
      • System question bank
    • New colour picker for the block background drawer which also affects the course index menu.

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