Teaching with Moodle

Hi Ralf,

this is one another way of achieving this without any customization or further development. you may try if fits to your requirements.

From Moodle2.4 onwards, when you use "Conditional Activities" system, you see one more option to restrict/allow activities based on user profile fields.

So, what if you create a custom drop down field in user profile like group1, group2, group3, and so on... and then at activity level select the group to which you wish to assign this activity? see the attached image for reference.

thanks

Nitin Jain

Hello Ralf,

Personally, what I could really use is the ability to add a user to a grouping, without having to first create a group for that single user like you did.

We use groups for work teams within our classes, with all the advantages of group functions, but we also use groupings to subdivide large classes into subgroups to which we grant access to different activities, such as videoconferencing at different times. When we are forced to create a group for each student in order to use Grouping to restrict access to resources, we cannot use the group functions for other uses.

Back to your question, here is a workaround you might want to consider (it is not very eloquent, but it works):

The idea is to use, in the Restrict access section for your activity or resource, the Grade condition fields to give access only to students authorized manually by the teacher who gave them an unofficial grade in another activity aimed exclusively at approve access to individuals. For each activity you want to be restricted to specific individuals, you add an Assignment activity, graded on 100 points, where the teacher manually enters a grade of 100 only for students who should have access to the activity.

For example, let's say you have a quiz, "Algebra quiz", you want only certain students in your class, regardless of group or grouping, to have access to. First, you create an Assignment activity that you can name, for example: "Authorization to access the algebra quiz". In Submission types for this activity, you uncheck all three types so the student has nothing to submit there. All you will use this assignment activity for is to manually enter a grade of 100 only for student you want to access the activity "Algebra quiz".

If you don't want the authorization activities to confuse the gradebook, in the gradebook you create a category called "Non-evaluated elements" in which you place that "Authorization to access the algebra quiz". You give this grade category an aggregation type of Weighted means of grade with a maximum grade of 0, so it does not count in the assignments for the course Gradebook. You can even hide this category in the gradebook so as to not confuse students. As for the "Authorization to access the algebra homework" activity itself, it should be visible on your Moodle main page, but you can put it in a section at the bottom of your site that you would title "Authorizations for access to resources"­.

In your "Authorizations to access algebra quiz" activity, you use the Restrict access section to enter as a Grade condition that activity "Authorization to access the algebra homework" must be at least 100 percent.

There you go. Sorry if I didn't explain it more fluently; I can answer questions if you have any.

Good luck,

Alex Boudreau

Université de Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada