Ways to customise the Moodle Mobile Experience

May 3, 2017

Last week we published a handy tips blog for creating mobile courses, as shared by our Moodle Mobile Team Leader, Juan, at last month’s MoodleMoot UK & Ireland in London.

We hope you found the seven tips useful, which can also be used together with the following mobile related helpful posts we recently published:

Another presentation that Juan shared at the recent Moot was on Customising the Moodle Mobile Experience.

The presentation contained important information on features that are already available in the Moodle Mobile App settings to help create the mobile learning experience suitable to yours and your students’ needs.

Please note that customising the Moodle Mobile experience will need someone with administration access to the App. In addition, because there are some technical requirements involved, we recommend that you firstly check with your site administrator.

Let’s have a look at ways to customise the Moodle Mobile experience!

Accessing the customisation options

Did you know that the Moodle Mobile App can be customised from the Moodle administration settings? If you are unsure how to access the administration settings, check with your site administrator or look through our Moodle documentations on this topic.

Any customisation you choose from the administration setting will be applied to the app when connecting to your Moodle site.

Now, these administration settings are available for Moodle 2.8 onwards with the Moodle Mobile additional features plugin.

The settings will also be available (without the need for the additional features plugin) in Moodle 3.3 core, scheduled to be released on Monday 8 May.

If you would like assistance to upgrade your site to Moodle 2.8 or higher to take advantage of these customisation options, please contact your local Moodle Partner.

A theme for your Moodle Mobile App

Want to make sure that the appearance of your Moodle Mobile App match that of the web version of your site?

The Moodle Mobile app can retrieve your custom styles from your Moodle site.

To do this, you need to go to Site Administration > Mobile app > Mobile appearance and from there add a link to your CSS file.

A full step by step guide for this can also be accessed via our Moodle documentations.

Moodle Mobile

Disabling features you don’t need!

The ability to disable any feature in your Moodle Mobile App (including activity modules) is an extremely important capability to ensuring that you customise the app to your needs and specifications.

For more information and step by step guide to disable the features you’d like in the App, please refer to our documentation.

Moodle Mobile

Add new menu items

What are some of the menu items you’d like to be shown in your Moodle Mobile App?

Did you know you can add new items to the app’s main menu? The link on the main menu can also be opened in the same app, external browser or embedded browser.

To add new menu items, you also need to go to your Site Administration and follow the steps from our documentation.

Moodle Mobile

Security options: Log-out or Change site

If you would like to increase the security of the App for your users, there is the option of making sure users will have to enter their password if they leave the site.

The “force log out” option can again be accessed via the Administration setting of the App as illustrated below.

Moodle Mobile

Customise language strings

Want to use your own wording for labels, links, menu items and more in your Moodle Mobile App? Words that your learners, students, teachers, educators or other users are more familiar with? Well you can!

Words and phrases displayed in the Moodle Mobile App can be customised via the “Custom language strings” (customlangstrings) setting in Administration > Site administration > Mobile app > Mobile features.
Check out our documentations for more information.

Moodle Mobile

So there you have it – options and ways that are available in the Moodle Mobile App settings to customise the mobile experience you would like for your educators, learners and yourself.

Juan has also kindly shared his presentation slides on this topic on slideshare which you can access anytime.

For more information, and questions, why not join our Moodle Mobile community forum: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=7798 or follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/moodlemobileapp