Hide activities per Groups or Groupings (Moodle 3.6)

Hide activities per Groups or Groupings (Moodle 3.6)

by Daniel Becerra -
Number of replies: 11

Hello there,

We use Moodle on a K12 School District with about 5000 students. This has been accomplished pretty much with the help of volunteers and reading the docs (haha)... I am familiar with the concept of Groups, Grouping and Restrict access. The problem is that Restrict Access only does that: Restricts Access. But students still see the activities of other groups; they just can't click on them. The same thing happens in the Gradebook page. All activities appear, even those that don't belong to your group. The only 'isolation' provided seems to be within the Participants/Enrolled users page.

The problem is that we have multiple Groups (classes) and multiple Teachers teaching a single Course.

We really want to take advantage of this Groups feature, but there doesn't seem to be a way to "emulate" truly isolated environments per Groups, either for Students nor Teachers (Gradebooks are already long enough; imagine multiple teachers working on them at the same time). And we don't want to create a Single course per Group. Do we have to, really? That really doesn't make much sense. We'd end up with Thousands of Courses (x5 more than what we have right now), which feels a bit unsustainable as there isn't a way for Moodle to manage multiple course settings at once.

(Why having Chemistry 8A, Chemistry 8B, Chemistry 8C, Chemistry 8D, Chemistry 8E as different courses, when we could have Chemistry 8 > Class A, B, C, D, E, as groups within the same Course?)

What are your thoughts on this? Has anyone accomplished filtering course content by Groups? How does this affect statistics and reports?

Kind regards.

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In reply to Daniel Becerra

Re: Hide activities per Groups or Groupings (Moodle 3.6)

by Mary Cooch -
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Hi there. A couple of thoughts:

Restrict Access only does that: Restricts Access. But students still see the activities of other groups; they just can't click on them. 

 If you completely hide the  Restrict access settings (by clicking the eye icon) then they shouldn't be able to see the activities of other groups at all.

If you remove the permission "moodle/site:accessallgroups" from the teacher role then they will only see the groups they have been put into. See the docs question 

How do I restrict a teacher to view only information about the groups that they are in?
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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Hide activities per Groups or Groupings (Moodle 3.6)

by Daniel Becerra -

Hi Mary, thank you for your response.

I tried toggling the visibility by clicking over the eye icon; however, that means I'd have to create a Restrict Access for every single group in the course: Class 1 off, Class 2 off, Class 3 off, Class 4 off, Class 5 off, Class 6 on. This is a bit unpractical :/

Regarding moodle/site:accessallgroups, this works well with filtering enrolled students; but it doesn't filter activities, so the gradebook will show as many columns as there are activities, even if they don't belong to your group; and you can even end up grading those activities by mistake (on students from your own group, of course, but inconvenient nonetheless).

Kind regards.

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In reply to Daniel Becerra

Re: Hide activities per Groups or Groupings (Moodle 3.6)

by Joost Elshoff -
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Hi Daniel,

As far as the Restrict Access rules are concerned, your description of how you're trying to get to the result is not correct. I'll describe how this should work for an Assignment set up specifically for Group 1, so that the other 5 groups don't see it:

Assignment

  • Restrict access > Group
    • Student must match the following:
      • Group ==> Group 1
      • Rule visible == no

The activity now is only visible to those students who are actually a member of Group 1, but not for all the students in groups 2 through 6.

If what you're looking for is more a filter within an activity in which teachers can only see those students who are part of their group, you could consider Separate groups for the course or activity and remove the permission Mary mentioned from the teacher role. 


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In reply to Joost Elshoff

Re: Hide activities per Groups or Groupings (Moodle 3.6)

by Daniel Becerra -

Thank you @Joost. I thought that setting was confusing, I'll now give it a try. Would it filter it out from the Gradebook as well? (for teachers)


Regards

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In reply to Daniel Becerra

Re: Hide activities per Groups or Groupings (Moodle 3.6)

by Ulises Peterson -
Hi @Daniel, I think it's a little bit later, but I have found there is a permission "Capabilities/moodle/course:ignoreavailabilityrestrictions" that you have to remove from Teachers, because this allows to access to all the course items within a course, even if they have restricctions. I had the same problem, and I did all the steps people are saying, and after I found this and removed it, then I got what you want (and so I).

Hope this was helpful.

Regards,

Ulises
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In reply to Ulises Peterson

Re: Hide activities per Groups or Groupings (Moodle 3.6)

by Pablo Ortiz -

Ulises, like de greek heroe, you resolve my problem.

Besides, I had to add a section restriction (my section is a kind of subgroup, but with different teachers), to only permit access if the user (student or teacher) belongs to a specific group. With this two conditions, teachers don't have access to another group at all

Thanks folk

Pablo


 


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In reply to Ulises Peterson

Ri: Re: Hide activities per Groups or Groupings (Moodle 3.6)

by Francesca Q -
Ulises, thank you so much for sharing your solution. We finally succeeded in restricting access to resources or topics to teachers of different groups. Thank you!!!
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In reply to Joost Elshoff

Re: Hide activities per Groups or Groupings (Moodle 3.6)

by Todd Sparrow -

I must have read this page several times trying to find the answer only to realize that Rule visible == no meant click the little eye icon... hope this helps someone else.  That is too easy to overlook!  I recommend adding a ? next to it as others have indicated... that would have clued me in to even try to click it.

To this...


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In reply to Todd Sparrow

Re: Hide activities per Groups or Groupings (Moodle 3.6)

by Antonio Seabra -

Hi Todd, thanks so much for that! I was scratching my head, "What am I doing wrong?"...

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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Hide activities per Groups or Groupings (Moodle 3.6)

by Rehan Amjad -
Hi Mary,
Thanks for your explanation
But right now we stuck in teacher setting like you mentioned we can remove permission from "moodle/site:accessallgroups" actually its not working for me, Teacher still can see other group content and we don't want to give access to other group.

Regards,
Rehan
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In reply to Daniel Becerra

Re: Hide activities per Groups or Groupings (Moodle 3.6)

by Dave Sherwin -
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Aloha there  Daniel,

We also use Moodle for a K12 public school district. Most of the secondary courses the teachers have their own courses. However when we implemented Moodle for the elementary student, we realized that it probably would be more efficient to create a single course for multiple teachers. Sort of a safe way to introduce Moodle to the elementary teachers to using a LMS before training them how to create content. This has been successful because the teachers are gaining experience using Moodle to have students do independent learning activities along with monitoring their students progress.

We only use Restrict access to release activities by date or activity completion so that the students are not overwhelmed when navigating the course. I am not sure if this idea will work for you because, we created the content and the teachers are using the same exact course with all the students doing the same learning activities. The teachers are not adding their own activities or resources yet.

What we found that works for us is to change the common module setting group mode to separate groups. That way when you follow Mary's instructions how to limit the teachers to their own students. So when each teacher looks at the activities that their students completed or progress, they will only see the results of their students and not ALL the students. So this works great for us, but our teachers cannot add their own learning activities yet because they are limited to non-editing teachers role.

Once the elementary teachers build a comfort level with teaching with Moodle, we will introduce them to creating content and will cross that bridge when it comes...

Attachment MoodleMultipleTchrs.jpg
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