format_topcoll

The concept of 'Collapsed Topics' arose from a need to segment a multi-unit course I was teaching, whereby a student would only need to look at the material for a given unit at any given time. So instead of the administrative complications of meta courses, and as there was no group or cohort functionality in Moodle at the time, I thought that given my experience I could potentially write some code as a plugin that would solve the problem and that of the 'Scroll of Death' that my students were currently experiencing. I then read in .Net Magazine (now no longer being published) issue 186, March 2009, an article entitled 'Collapsed Tables' by Craig Grannell (of Snub Communications) and thought that was the way to address the issue, so I contacted him and received permission to reuse the idea. And so in Moodle 1.9 I set to work creating the first version of 'Collapsed Topics' using 'cookies' to store the state of the toggles, as I'd as yet at the time not learned how to use a server based solution. Having completed the first version, I backported it to Moodle 1.8. Then the complexities of the EU Cookie Law assisted the momentum towards a server side solution that didn't use 'Cookies', and since then with the 'GDPR' regulations the format does now implement the 'Privacy API - https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Privacy_API' as the toggle states pertain to an identifiable user. There has now been a version of the format for every major version of Moodle ever since the first, gradually being improved and enhanced over the years in addition to coping with the API changes.