Hi there,
Stealth activities (Moodle 3.3) get rid of the need for orphaned topics which is great. However, it appears that the option to have 'Orphaned Topics' is also gone. It would be useful to be able to have stealth topics as well as stealth activities.
Maybe this is something I should raise a tracker about?
Thanks,
Catherine
Hi
Just a follow up to the post above. This may be the same problem as C Behan is experiencing.
I am running into a few issues in terms of using the new stealth activities. Currently we use orphaned sections in the design of Moodle courses. Activities sit within one orphaned section, and in other orphaned sections sit bootstrap labels that link to the activities.
With the new stealth activities and loss of orphaned sections the problem is these 'designed' courses can't function in the way they were intended to. Also stealth activities do not apply to labels.
Is there any possibility of a future implementation of stealth sections as well as activities? Does anyone have any idea of a work around?
Sorry Mary for not responding sooner and thanks Gemma for reminding me!
Yes - we often have labels containing icons at the top that link to an orphaned section containing a few resources and activities. The label looks good as users are just seeing icons and minimal text when they enter a course page rather than a list of activities. If you like I can PM you with log in details if you want to see an example.
Also we might link to an orphaned section rather than the activity itself when there is an access restriction. Say for example we have a quiz and when users get a passing grade they can download the cert. There is a label at the top with a certificate icon. If the user clicks on the label containing the cert icon too early, they are brought to the section and see the access restrictions and the reason they can't download it yet. If we linked to the cert directly, users would just see a message that this activity is hidden and no explanation as to why they can't get their cert.
This isn't a problem yet for us as we're not on Moodle 3.3 but it will be in the future if we can't use stealth topics!
Thanks, Catherine
Thank you Catherine,
I did not find existing tracker issues so I have created MDL-59411 for this. We really need to display access restriction message instead of plain "This activity is hidden". In this case you will be able to link to the activity directly and students will know why they can't access it
Hi Mary,
We are running Moodle 3.1 currently testing Moodle 3.3 and we are quite concerned about the demise of orphan activities and number of sections. Like other contributors, we design courses with "menus" and "buttons" in the top section (generalities) and internal links towards individual sections with the number of course sections being "0" in the course settings. This allows us to have a course that looks like this with all the icons/buttons leading to different invisible sections :
The course view - once in Edit Mode with the number of sections being visible - is like this :
Will the Stealth Activities allow us to design the courses in the same way ? Can we re-activate the number of sections in the course settings to make entire sections invisible rather than actitivies ?
Many of our courses follow this design as they are very popular with students and when designing non-linear courses which is not easy - except perhaps with the grid format.
Does anyone have a solution to this ? There is a revolution brewing up as my colleagues and I are faced with the awful prospect of having to redesign dozens of courses between now and September 1st...
Thank you for your input,
Isabelle
Hello both. I'm interested in this as I don't recall linking to whole orphaned sections myself (which I think is what you are explaining; sorry if I am a bit slow) One of the reasons stealth activites were set up was because 'orphaning' didnt work properly with the mobile app and caused navigational confusion for some users. How do your students find the orphaned sections work currently when using the mobile app?
Hi Mary,
I realise it is difficult to explain in words and unfortunately I messed up the screenshots earlier!
I have attached a screenshot of my course "menu" in the general section with icons and images leading to different sections through internal links. In the course settings, the number of sections is "0" and the only section displayed is the header.
The second screenshot shows the course view when I change the number of sections to "12" which are then displayed in a linear fashion.
Our students do not use the mobile app and we have not encountered the problem of orphan sections going "missing".
It would be useful for us to retain this format so we don't have to modify all the courses that use this particular design. Is there still a course format with the number of sections that can be selected: either in the course settings or elsewhere in Moodle 3.3?
Thank you for your help
How are you linking to the orphaned sections? On 3.2 if I make a link such as https://mymoodlesite.com/course/view.php?id=5#section-3 and then remove section 3 so it is orphaned, I can't then see section three as a student. (I'm just trying to replicate your system on a 3.2 site. ) That said, as mentioned earlier in the thread there is no option to 'make available' for a section, only for an individual activity, which makes me think the only way is to paste all activity links from a section into a page and make that page available but not shown. However, yes, that is a lot of work if you have been using orphaned sections (which I'm still trying to make work properly in 3.2)
Hi Mary,
When we used to make links to orphaned sections in version 2.5, we could get the section link with a right-click with the "one section per page" setting activated. The link should look like this to work correctly : http://mymoodlesite/course/view.php?id=3173§ion=2
In version 3.1, for some strange reason, the syntax of the link is different as in your own link : https://mymoodlesite.com/course/view.php?id=5#section-3
If you modify all your links to change the characters that are different, your internal links to "hidden sections" will work properly. I do not know enough about php to understand why this is the case but one of my IT developper colleagues explained to me what needed to be done.
This is what we would like to replicate in Moodle 3.3 because as far as I can see, the stealth activites do not give us the same freedom with the design (unless I am still missing something).
I think we will stay on 3.1 until we resolve this as it impacts too many of our courses at the moment.
Hi Isabelle and thanks for that I see what you mean and I can only say that I don't know of a way to do this - hopefully others will respond in this thread with other comments. You could always make a tracker report for stealth mode to be included in topic sections, but I don't know enough either to know if it would be doable or not (bearing in mind stealth mode was developed because of the lack of usability and accessiblity of the old orphaned sections - especially as the mobile app is increasingly popular.)
We use orphaned sections in the exact same way as Isabelle. We also do not use the mobile app, therefore orphaned sections do not affect usability.
I am in support of a tracker being raised for 'stealth sections' and also 'stealth' ability on labels as we often create bootstrap styled menu buttons in a label. Switching to stealth mode and not having the ability to orphan sections would have a great impact as most of our courses would need some considerable re-designing to retain functionality.
Hi Mary, Gemma and Catherine,
Thank you for your contribution to this thread. Forgive my ignorance, but can you tell me how to make a tracker report for 'stealth sections' given the benefits to course design ? I can imagine it will affect quite a few people in the community and it would be useful to get this issue sorted out if it is at all possible.
Isabelle
Thanks for this thread everybody,
Just like Mary I never realised that one can actually link to orphaned sections. It looks like you were exploiting the bug in Moodle behavior as a feature.
To summarise what was set above, here are the reproduction instructions (on Moodle 3.2 or earlier):
I must say, Moodle users are very creative! I would never think of doing that, I would just install a course format that does buttons for you. I'm pretty sure Grid format was designed exactly for this scenario.
This is what I can recommend you in Moodle 3.3 to keep this behavior:
After upgrade all orphaned sections will automatically become "hidden". You will need to unhide sections one by one.
Now you need to hide the links to the sections from the course main page. You can do it by adding the CSS :
ul.topics li.section-summary { display:none}
How can you add CSS? There are multiple options for it.
As I said, these are all just workarounds and hacks to make the "Topics" format look like some other course format. The best solution will be to use the proper course format.
Hi Marina,
Thank you very much for this fix, I will have a word with the developers to test it on the post-prod version of our 3.3 platform.
Do you think it would be possible to set a tracker on this specific issue though? It would be interesting to have 'stealth topics' as well as 'stealth activities'? For people not using the app, it could be an option that can be activated.
What was a Moodle bug for others became for us a more flexible way of designing courses than the grid view.
I would do it myself but I don't know the procedure for generating trackers !
Isabelle
Interesting, I was thinking about creating "stealth" sections as well while working on MDL-4782 but then thought it did not make much sense. It was even included in my early version of code.
It will be better if actual users create requests for improvements in tracker. In this case you can describe you use cases, attach screenshots, etc. You will also be subscribed to watch the discussions or changes on that issues.
The procedure of creating tracker issues is very simple - you need to sign up, click either "watch" or "vote" on any existing OPEN tracker issue and then you will be able to create a new one.
Hi all
Just to let you know I have created a tracker with 'stealth' topics as an improvement request.
https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-59481
Hi all
I'm also very interesting by ergonomic and visual (and the new stealth power )
I'm agree with the Grid format and his possibilities about what you want to do, but it's, also, a little bit frustrated to can't add a better visual about label and pictures...
The Marina's css code works very well (tested on my own 3.3) and I voted for the tracker too.
BUT there is always all the section links into the navigation block (with other theme than boost)
Cheers
Hi Luiggi,
The frustrating thing about the section links in the navigation block is that this type of display doesn't fit in with the idea of non-linear courses... We have more demands from the teachers for these type of courses and it's a real shame to have to go back to the same old display because the Grid Format doesn't quite cut it in my view.
Good news for all of us using the hidden sections "bug" though: it still works in Moodle 3.3 and the migrated courses first appear with all the sections visible but as soon as you click on a label/image in the menu, the only section displayed under the header is the one that has a link to it. We don't have to modify all our courses - hurray!
When creating a new course, the same thing happens. All it takes is for the teacher/student to click once and the desired effect is maintained. It's not ideal but it will do for now.
Enjoy the summer
We too are looking at the idea of stealth Topics. We want to be able to dispense with the contents menu down the side, but only in certain courses thus we do not want to install additional themes etc.
If Moodle could make it "lagitimately" possible to create stealth topics as well as activities, that would be amazing.
Right now I'm improvising following the ideas above.
That allows you to add a topic section: right?
In the earlier versions where you could just go into the course settings and change the number of topic blocks you required it was far easier, I think any way. I see this has also been removed from 3.5.
I can't even delete topic sections in the same way as before, thus resulting in orphaned sections which is a bit of a irritation. It means I can't even set up a "Stealth Topic" anymore.
When I create a new course with 6 topic sections in it and restore a course with 31 sections in it, it simply creates the additional sections.
Any thoughts anyone.
I'm not sure if we are all talking about more or less the same thing, but I have requested both be reinstated via the following Tracker: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-59481
Hopefully, if enough people start to beat on the box we might see it come back. I was for my part quite shocked when I saw that I was not able to add nor delete sections through the course settings. This distinctly means you have the opportunity to create orphaned sections removed. As for stealth, for us it would be a great feature, though I realize for some others not, thereby surely it would be a benefit if it could be made a feature that is enabled or disabled at admin level.
Please, oh please could you bring this back?
Marina,
I have tried your work around from above in both Moodle 3.4.2+ and 3.5 and it just does not seem to function.
I tried all of the options you gave, I tried to change the themes but all to no avail.
It would be just so much easier if the developers at Moodle could reinstate what we had before. As one user commented, the situation was not as we users see it a bug. Only the Moodle developers thought of it that way. For us the situation was more of an unseen feature that Moodle had not thought about.
Either way, it is now causing many of us to put on hold any upgrade plans until we can find a sensible way to work around this.
By the way, if anyone has found a quick and easy way to get around this I would really appreciate it since we plan to launch a new course next Autumn semester, and this would have been a major part of the course, so I'm starting to get desperate.
Very best regards,
Paul
Hi Mary,
We were using the grid format with orphaned activities. We'd link to these using a linked imaged as detailed above by Isabelle. 
(Edited by Mary Cooch to clarify subject- original submission Tuesday, 4 September 2018, 11:37 AM)
(Edited by Mary Cooch - original submission Tuesday, 4 September 2018, 12:36 PM)
Hi Fran,
Ok, first turn on the core setting 'allowstealth'. Then in the grid format have sections where you want teachers to create the activities. Hide those sections. Then for the activities in those sections, hide them so that they then say 'Hidden from students' underneath. Then in the sections that the students can see, create what you need with links to the hidden activities. Finally, test with a test student account.
G
Hi Gareth,
this works for linking to individual activities. Thanks! Is there a way to link to the section so that the student could see the whole list of activities? For example I might have a collection of PowerPoints in a section labelled "presentation" and if there's 12 of them I don't really want to add 12 links on primary section for that unit.
Many thanks,
Fran
I see what you mean... so on the page I would create links to the activities. That makes sense, though in order to do this for every activity on all of our courses would take a long time.
Thanks so much for your help, I really appreciate it. I think until we can make sections 'stealth' I'm going to have to resort to a more conventional layout within the grid format.
Once again, many thanks for your assistance.
Hi Fran,
I haven't found a workaround that doesn't involve editing the course format itself. If that option isn't available to you then you'll need to restructure your course unfortunately.
There is a tracker item for this - please vote to get it considered!
Thanks
catherine
(Edited by Mary Cooch - original submission Tuesday, 4 September 2018, 12:46 PM)
Fran,
If your stealth topics don't include items that are graded, have completion tracking or content that is private, something to consider could be to put your stealth topics in to another course page that allows guest access, and link to them.
At the bottom of each topic then add a back button so that the students can easily navigate back to the main course page - https://www.w3schools.com/Jsref/met_his_back.asp
Messy, but might be an option for you.
Catherine
