Courses and course formats

Hi Garcia,

There is not a course format that I know of that implements that sort of scenario.  There are weekly ones that hide forthcoming weeks and put the current at the top.

But what I think you would like is based upon the students enrolment date with sections acting like topics and only becoming visible to the student every seven day increments.  It is possible to write such a bespoke format as long as the enrolment date is within an accessible variable.

If you want to do this yourself, then have a look at: http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Course_Format and how the core and contributed formats are written.

Cheers,

Gareth

Moodle does offer a feature called "activity completion" that let's students keep track of what they have done.  I use this.  It is easy to set up.  Students like it.

Moodle also supports conditional assignments, that can encourage the linear completion of activities.  I haven't used this, so I can't comment about its difficulty to apply.

I am a professor who does like to pace my courses, turning assignments on when ready.  But I have never wanted to do this student by student.

Hi Garcia,

Did you try self enrolment as enrolment method? You can set the enrolment duration to days or weeks. Whenever the student enrols in your course, this is the beginning for him/her. There is no need for a specific start time. You could then restrict access to topic 2 by setting up conditions for completion of activities in topic 1. 

The enrolment duration will calculate the end date. After this the student will be removed from the course, i.e., all the course work done by the student will be removed either if I understand the Moodle docs correctly.

With kind regards,

Hartmut

Thanks to everyone ^^

I got a general idea, however I'm following the Harmut advice, which fix more or less what I want!

This is my new settings for the Course A:

• "Weekly format": I get a topic per week (well, a section per week)
  
• "Self enrolment": Different students can start in different weeks (so I don't have to create the course several times).
  

• "Allowing only cohort memebers to self-enrolment": I can restrict students to particular courses.

At first, I did it with groups but they don't have sense out-side a Course, I cannot add members to a group if they are not already enrolled on the course. So, I found Cohort, which saved my problem. Now, i got what I sketched at the beginning of this thread :D

Kind regards!!

ggarcia

I think you guys are onto something here.

There is regularly a request for something like this: management of a course when students can enrol at any time and you do not want them to proceed at their own pace, you want them week by week.

Conditional display is based ONLY on the previous completion condition and I think there is no way for this to be based on TIME.

So using the conditional option a student can race through the course.  I like this of course.  Why limit a student to your speed?  But there are some requirements where it is needed to have the release of new material each week.

Also: roll on conditional release of sections!!!!

Good luck

-Derek

Solution:

1) Using Weekly format I got "Current Week Class" (current) so the only thing I have to do it's just hide every week after that one.

http://jsfiddle.net/c0ca6t14/

But there is a problem: I cannot edit next weeks because I don't see them

2) Why don't we use JS to add "Hidden Class" (hidden)

http://jsfiddle.net/cb2yrzLx/

But there is a X-XSS-Protection issue when adding aditional HTML: A security vulnerability!

Anyways Moodle says it's possible but in last Chrome versions you will get an error.

3) So, let's use the base of point 1 looking for an "Edition Class" (editing)

http://jsfiddle.net/hnxbdfw5/

Here we are, It works, see screenshots 01 and 02

Copy this to your Theme/Clean "Custom CSS":

:not(.editing) .weeks>li.current ~ li {

    display: none;

}

.editing .weeks>li.current ~ li {

    display: inline;

}

Furthermore

We use "Self enrolment" to make courses start depending on when the students want to start its course and "Cohort" to avoid "Self enrolment" access to some courses.

Thanks for all your comments, hope this helps many people!