Use case
Periodically we need to carry out maintenance or updates to our Moodle platform hosted at ULCC. We try to only do these, especially if they pose risk to the service, during our ‘at risk’ times on Tuesday mornings 07:00 - 09:00.
In the majority of cases any work carried out does not impact the service at all but occasionally some service interruption is unavoidable. This may be a restart of the web server or a significant outage.
We propose adding a notification block to all Moodlers homepages to ensure important messages are conveyed and absorbed.
Lose case
Service unavailability that was not communicated sufficiently well has inevitably caused issues for students and staff who need access to the platform at that time, e.g. to retrieve lecture presentations before a 9am class. This notification block is our response to alleviate those issues.
Whose case
The block will be visible, when there is one or more messages to display, on student and staff My Moodle pages. It is important that all Moodlers are aware of any potential downtime well ahead of the event. Asynchronous methods of communication, such as email, are problematic in that people have an inbox overload and it is easy to miss important messages in the noise. Posting on institutional services such as our Service Desk portal and our Message of the Day news pages may not be seen.
It was felt that placing the messages in Moodle, directly on the landing page following login, would get the most eyeballs. We do not want it to be intrusive but informative and, above all, noticeable.
Choose case
The idea is a block that we will add to the default My Moodle layout so all users will see it. They can ‘opt-out’ by hiding or deleting the block but this would be discouraged. We hope that by ensuring that only important, succinct and pertinent notifications are displayed it will encourage people to notice the block when it is visible.
News case
It is envisaged that the notifications will be constrained to content that is of high importance. If generic ‘news’ is added it is likely that the effect of seeing the block will be diluted and a localised information overload will lead to glazing over when presented with posts. The appearance of the block should be a triggered call to action.
Views case
We looked at currently available solutions and found none that quite fit our requirements. We have developed a custom block that will sit above the Course Overview block on the My Moodle page.
If there are no current notifications to display the block will not be visible.
Moodle Administrators can add messages through the back end. Messages can be configured to appear in red for high impact notifications.
Each notification should be on a new line. The format of each notification should be:
{notification text}|{start date/time}|{end date/time}|{type}. date/time should be YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm. date/times are UTC. type should be one of normal, important. Example: Test notification|2015-11-18T09:00|2015-11-18T17:00|normal
This allows the addition of messages that can have specific durations so that we can automate posts ahead of time or for recurring tasks.
Tues case
We will maintain Tuesday 07:00 - 09:00 as an ‘at risk’ window for scheduled changes to the live service and encourage people, where possible, to avoid having critical events during, or directly following, this period.
Moose case
If we moose, erm, miss any important notifications we would like to remind Moodlers to check the other information services such as Message of the Day or the Service Now portal and to report any incidents via the Service Desk.
image from http://rileyandco.blogspot.co.uk
You said "If there are no current notifications to display the block will not be visible." I say, brilliant - that you should do the trick then.
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