When creating a course on Moodle LMS, there are many ways to organise and display your content. For example, you can lay out learning materials, resources and activities in different sections: organised by topic, by week, by day, or by any criteria you decide.
In many cases, you will want to ensure that learners have done all tasks in one course section before moving on to the next one. Until now, to do this, you had to use Moodle LMS’s Restrict access feature on each of your activities and prevent learners from starting them unless all the previous tasks had been completed. The good news is: there’s now a new way to restrict access to a course section based on the completion of a previous section, in just one single step!
New Moodle Plugin: restriction by other section completion
The Moodle community contributes to and supports the evolution of Moodle LMS in an ongoing cycle of improvement. In this case, it’s German Moodler Stefan Scholz who has developed this new plugin that will make teachers’ and administrators’ jobs much easier by creating the new completion criteria “Section completion”.
What do I need?
Your Moodle site administrator simply needs to download and install the Restriction by other section completion plugin from the Moodle plugins directory, and course teachers can take it from there.
How to set up Restriction by other section completion
When restricting access to a section, you now have a new option: “Section completion”.
Select this and then simply choose the section you want to be completed in order to display the current section.
Let’s look at an example of this plugin in action:
The teacher in this course wants the first section, “Course welcome”, to be completed before the following section, “Background information” is displayed to learners.
To achieve that, the teacher goes to the “Background information” section and adds a new restriction to access it: students must have completed the first section, ‘Course welcome’ to see this new one.
How learners see it
Let’s follow student Matvei as he scrolls down the page now this new plugin has been enabled. He has a much more streamlined experience, and can clearly see that he must complete all activities in the first section in order to move on to the next ‘Background information’ section:
And of course, behind the scenes, his teacher is also pleased because he saved time and effort setting up his course! A win-win for everyone!
Want to know more?
Stop press! Stefan is already planning new features for the next version of the plugin, including a “previous section with completion” option that will make it easier to add restriction settings even if you move sections around your course page. You can leave your feedback and join the discussion on the Plugin’s page.
Moodle plugins are add-ons that you can install to your Moodle platform to add a specific feature, functionality or even appearance to your Moodle site. Only Moodle administrators can add plugins to a Moodle site – so if you are a teacher and would like to try one, talk to your Admin
