Access to any resource, activity or section can be restricted by date/time, grade earned on a prior activity and/or by completion of a prior activity, resource or section. (With Moodle 2.4+ access may also be restricted by user field as well.) This setting is labelled Restrict access on the settings page for every resource, activity and section in Moodle. Using the Restrict access feature is often referred to as using conditionals in a Moodle course.

Note: In order for prior completion of an activity, resource or section to be used Completion tracking must be enabled at both the site and course level.  Please see Turning Completion Tracking on in a Course for enabling Completion tracking within a Moodle Course.

Setting Restrict access features:

Edit the settings of the activity, resource or section that you want to restrict access to.

For example, in the Employee Safety section of a course you may want students to review resources prior to posting in the forum. With completion tracking, you could require the student to view the resources pages before it is marked complete in the course. To set this completion tracking option, edit the setting for the resource page:

In the screenshot above the student is required to open the resource page in order for Moodle to mark the activity as complete. (Of course, this does not control that the students actually review material provided on the resource page.)

Next edit the settings of the activity (in this case Employee Safety Policies Discussion).

Scroll to the Restrict access category on the Edit settings page that appears:

Click on Restrict access to see all choices available:

Any combination of date/time, grade and activity completion settings may be used.

Once conditionals have been set select whether or not the user will see the resource, activity, or section title prior to conditions being met:

The student will see the following in the course:

The Employee Safety Policies Discussion is showed as a greyed-out link with the “Not available until… ” message.

Restricting Access to a Course Section:

Edit the section settings and the same Restrict Access conditions are available:

End-User Support for Moodle course instructors is available through our Moodle Reference Desk.