Flexible column positions - you may rearrange the layout-table columns with an array in your theme config.php.

$THEME->layouttable = array('left', 'right', 'middle');

Attached a short theme comparison between standard and a new theme sketch with clear visual content / sideblock differentiation to show new theme layout possibilities. And this flexibility brings another advantage - you can place the right column to the left when you want to work with a 2-column layout and get this way the edit buttons to the left. These edit buttons sticking to the right side reduced flexibility.

I'll commit the changes to index.php, course/topics/form.php. The layouttable setting is optional, the routine checks for the variable and sets the array to the Moodle standard column order when no values are set. I didn't change the column writing parts. I surrounded them with a foreach loop and a switch statement. For the moment all changes have starting and ending comments. And I attach a theme "standard1" for checking and testing.

Petr or Martin, could you please have a look if the code can be optimized? Thanks.

Rearanging the admin page columns and the other course formats may be done when the code is ok.