Best practice forum (Archived)

Moodle's breadcrumb incompatible with Totara Programs

The "breadcrumb" trail shown at the top of a course indicates the category hierarchy leading to it eg:

Home > All Courses > Special Courses > This Course Name

At the start of a Program, the breadcrumb shows the categories the program is in eg:

Home > All Programs > Combined Programs > This Program Name

... but on entering a Course in the Program, the user will see eg:

Home > All Courses > Special Courses > First Course of Program

... and so the breadcrumb does not show a path back to the Program they are in. This is confusing for the user and seemingly almost pointless; but we think there is a real need to provide a link back to the parent program (and presumably first to hide the breadcrumb in the theme if it can't be made useful).

Is there a way to show an obvious way back to the start of a Program? Perhaps there is a block which can be configured to show a list of the user's programs; or a fixed URL which will go to the parent program - it must be possible to calculate this; has it been done already somewhere?

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This is technically pretty difficult, because it's possible to have the same course in multiple programs, or to be doing a course independently that happens to also be part of one of your programs.

The only way I could see this working is if you somehow tracked that they had clicked into the course via a program and modified the breadcrumbs, but unfortunately the breadcrumbs are built up independently on every page, so even if we updated every page on the site, there are still cases (like pages inside 3rd party modules) that wouldn't know to display "our" breadcrumbs.

I do see what you are saying though and I'll have a think about it and see if I can come up with a workable solution (maybe a block is the way to go).

In the mean time, hiding the breadcrumbs via the theme would be pretty straight-forward - just add "div.breadcrumb { display:none; }" to your theme.

Simon

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That's pretty much what we thought. In all the usages we've seen it is highly unlikely that someone would be enrolled in the same course via different programs but no doubt it will crop up one day. While tracking a user's route could in theory keep the breadcrumb accurate, it is a lot of extra overhead.

The most economical solution we can think of would be to add a block listing a user's programs. Then at least they have somewhere to click back to the start. I'm hoping that there is already a function somewhere in the PHP code that lists programs ...

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I have seen a couple of situations were a course have appeared in a couple of diffrent programs assigned to the same user (though not offten).

Tracking a users route I would suspect is hard once the user has accessed the course once and completion tracking started, the course could be accessed from many different places outside of the program it's self.

A block should be easy to do, show all the programs the course belongs to that the user is also enrolled on.... I think it's of benefit to show the user all the programs as, I would want to see what progress I achieve by completing this 1 course... and that may be progress in serveral programs.

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