Hiding and restricting material: conditional release

Stefan Rennick Egglestone

New Media Design

Computer Science

With extra material from Learning Team

Background

A course taught in both Malaysia and the UK. Both groups of students doing many of the same activities essentially as a distance course.

So we needed to:

• Hide individual items from students while they were under preparation and not yet ready, 
• Hide whole sections or topics of material until ready (e.g., prepare later weeks of the module in advance but not release)
• Hide material from students until a certain date
• Not allow students to view resources for a particular week until they have completed the previous week, i.e. make viewing of one resource conditional upon having viewed or acted on a previous item.

What did you do?

1. Hide some sections by "poking in the eye"

2. Release items by restricting access - setting a date within the settings for the item

3. Make a resource or an activity conditional on an action in a previous one

e.g.. Week 2 is not available until a score has been achieved in the Week 1 Quiz, and so on

The Quiz has very simple questions just to test that students have watched the podcast.

Once they have completed the quiz, the next week's podcast and activities become available.

How did it work out with students?

The progression works as designed. Students work it through from beginning to end.

It provides a way to offer a linear and uncluttered learning pathway.

Note: Normally students cannot access anything that is greyed out in Moodle.

Not only this, but also...

You can use any activity - so long as you can set completion criteria - to trigger conditional release, not just quizzes.

Examples

• You must have contributed a post to the Introductions Forum before you can see the first assignment
• You must have viewed the Problems before you can see the Answer sheet

Recommendations and tips

• Check out your module by changing your role to Student
• If you return to the front page of your module and items you expect to be hidden or deleted are still there, then reload / refresh the page (to clear the cache)
• Keep the sequence of conditional activities simple - it may help to plan them on paper

More information

• Video of Stefan Rennick Egglestone speaking at Elearning Community on Internationalisation
• Presentation about this case study (PDF)

How to achieve this

• Students can't see something in my module: I can see it greyed out...
• How to manage hidden resources, sections and modules (Video)
• How to enable conditional activities