Restrict access to sections and activities
The restrict access feature enables teachers to restrict the availability of any activity, resource or course section according to conditions such as date, grade obtained, group or other activity completion.
It allows gamification of courses and provides a way to guide students through a course in a specified order, creating alternative pathways and introducing repetition (for example).
Such mechanisms can allow teachers to offer learning experiences that cater more to individuals, providing reinforcement when it is needed.
In this guide:
What can be restricted?
Restrictions can be applied to individual activities and resources or whole sections. Where a restriction is applied to a section, it affects all content within that section and will override any restrictions to individual items.
Restriction criteria
Restrictions can be based on a number of criteria and will vary according to your course set up.
- Activity completion - This is one of the more commonly used restrictions. It requires a student to complete another activity before this one is made available. The settings allow this to include completion of any one of a group of activities, or all of the selected activities. N.B: activity completion must be enabled in the course to use this criterion.
- Date - This allows sections or activities to be made available at specific points through a course e.g. weekly readings or quizzes. They can also be hidden after a specified date.
- Grade - This requires students to have achieved a particular grade or grade range in another activity or the course itself to be able to access the restricted content.
- Group - This option is available if there are groups set up in the Moodle course.
- Grouping - This option is available if there are groupings set up in the Moodle course.
- Other course completion - This requires a student to complete another course before this activity or resource is made available. N.B: activity completion must be enabled in the dependent course to use this criterion.
- User profile - Restrict based on fields within a student's profile. This is useful if you need to restrict something to one or more particular students e.g. by ID number
- Level - Only available if using the Level Up activity in the course.
- Restriction set - This offers the possibility of creating several criteria using all/any to create complex conditions
How to add a restriction
- Go to the Moodle space and enable Edit mode.
- Click the Edit icon to the right of the item you want to restrict access for.
- Click Edit settings.
- Click Restrict Access to expand the section.
- Click the Add restriction button.
- Choose the restriction type.
- Optionally, hide this restriction information (and the activity) from students
Hide restriction information from students
Please note the eye icon to the left of each restriction. You can toggle this between the open and shut state for each restriction. In the event of a conflict, the shut eye always takes precedence and the activity or section will not be visible to the student.
- If the eye is SHUT then students who do not meet that part of the condition will not see the activity.
- If the eye is OPEN the students who do not meet that part of the condition will see the activity but it will be greyed out. They will have information about why they can't access it.
For more guidance on using Restrict access please see Moodle Docs . This page also has links to gamification examples that use Restrict access in complex ways to encourage participation and engagement with materials.