Topics Covered In This Article

Introduction

Restrictions limit the availability of any resource, activity or section of your course according to certain conditions such as groups & groupings, dates, grade obtained or by making the activity dependent on the completion of another activity. For example, you could restrict students from accessing a unit quiz if they haven't viewed the unit course material.

Activity completion allows you to set completion criteria in an activity's settings. The criteria might be viewing the activity, receiving a certain score and having Moodle mark the activity as complete or you can allow the student to mark the activity as complete. A check (tick) appears against the activity when the student meets this criteria, so you and your students can track their progression through the course.

Combining Activity completion with an option called Course completion, you can then use the Course completion block to indicate when a student has completed all required activities in the course.

Set-up restrictions

To set-up restrictions edit the resource or activity and locate the Restrict access section. Click Add restriction... to view the options in a pop-up window:

Choose the restriction you want to use. You can add more than one of each type of restriction, just click Add restriction... to open the pop-up window again. Once you have the restrictions added, you can adjust these settings to scaffold the learning process. Once you have restricted access on an activity or resource, students must meet the set criteria for it before they can access other activities or resources in the course.

For example, you may want to restrict access to an activity or resource over a certain timeframe - add two Date restrictions and then set the Date from and the Date until options.

Or use the Grade restriction to choose an activity (e.g., an assignment) that students must complete with a certain grade before they can move on to attempt a final assignment or other activity.

Another option is the Activity completion restriction. You may want the students to complete an activity or view a resource before moving forward in the course.

Set-up activity completion

Here is an example of how you would set-up your course to require students to view the Course Overview before they can access Introduction to unit 1.

Set-up

Before you can use activity completion, you need to enable it in the course settings. In the Administration block, click Edit settings under course administration.

In the Completion tracking section, select Yes.

You need to create the two resources where you will be applying the restrictions. In this example, we have created the Course Overview as a book and Unit 1 Introduction as page.

Completion tracking must be enabled for the Course overview. Go to edit settings in the course overview, scroll down to Activity completion, and ensure that Completion tracking is enabled. It can be set for students to manually mark it as complete (meaning they can put a check mark next to its name in the course) OR certain conditions can be set so that Moodle will automatically mark it as complete when those conditions are met.

Next, you will adjust the settings in the Unit 1 Introduction page to restrict access until students have completed viewing the Course overview.

Go to edit settings for the Unit 1 Introduction page.

Scroll down to the Restrict access section at the bottom and click on the Add Restriction button and click the Activity Completion button.

Next to Activity completion, select the Course Overview book.

The eyeball to the left of Activity completion in the above image determines the visibility of the item while it's restricted. If the eyeball is shown as it is above, the activity will be greyed out. Clicking the eyeball will show a line across it and cause the item to be completely hidden from students.

Students who have not yet viewed the Course Overview will see the Unit 1 Introduction greyed out, with an explanation as to why it's not available:

Students who have viewed the Course Overview will see the Unit 1 Introduction without the restriction.

Turn on course completion tracking

Once you have set-up at least one activity to be marked as completed, click on the Gear menu in the top right and then click on Course completion. You will be able to track student progress through the course.

This opens a page where you configure settings and choose which activities need to be completed for the course to be marked as complete. Here is a partial list of the activities that need to be completed in this course before it will be marked as complete.

As an instructor you can view student progress: Gear menu > More > Course Completion. A solid black check mark below an activity indicates that the activity has been completed.

Add the Course completion block to your course if you want students to have the ability to track their course completion progress.

When a student clicks on More details it opens opens a detailed report for that student, indicating which activities have been completed and the completion method in use.

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