Guest role
Guest access
Moodle has a built-in "Guest account". Visitors can log in as guests using the "Login as a guest" button on the login screen and enter any courses which allow guest access. In addition, logged-in users can enter any courses which allow guest access without being required to enrol.
Guests ALWAYS have "read-only" access - meaning they can't leave any posts or otherwise mess up the course for real students.
They cannot:
- Post in forums
- Edit wiki pages
- Participate in a chat
- Take quizzes
- Submit assignments
- Contribute glossary entries or comments
- View SCORM content (because progress not tracked for a guest)
- Receive any scores or grades (because of the read-only access)
This feature can be handy when you want to let a colleague in to look around at your work, or to let students see a course before they have decided to enrol.
Note that you have a choice between two types of guest access: with an enrolment key or without. If you choose to allow guests who have the key, then the guest will need to provide the current enrolment key EVERY TIME they log in (unlike students who only need to do it once). This lets you restrict which guests can get into a course. If you choose to allow guests to enter without a key, then anyone can get into your course.
If you want guests to be able to take quizzes, or any of the other activities listed above, and have considered the security implications, you can create a visitor account, say with username = password = visitor, for everyone to share.
Enabling guest access
To enable guest access to a Moodle site, the guest login button should be set to "show" by an admin in Administration > Users > Authentication.
Teachers can then set whether their courses allow guest access in the course settings.
To allow visitors to be logged in as guests automatically when entering courses with guest access, the autologinguests box should be checked by an admin in Administration > Users > Permissions > User policies.
Disabling guest access
Guest access for visitors can be disabled by hiding the guest login button. In the site administration block go to Users > Authentication > Manage Authentication and scroll down to the Guest Login Button pulldown menu.
- TIP: Generally speaking, if any courses allow guest access then there will be no way for a visitor to log into the site and thus they will not be able to see these courses.
Self-enrolment
Sometimes you may wish to allow people to have a more interactive engagement with a course without you having to enrol them in advance. In this case you can enable "self-enrolment" for your course. This allows anyone with a user account on your Moodle server to become a student on your course. As with guest access, you can use the enrolment key to limit this only to people to whom you have given the key.
Skip login page by URL
When you want get URL for external peoples to view You moodle pages witch allowed guest access, you can add to one simple URL parameter username=guest to skip login page and automatically login this users as Guests.
For example, this URL will be ask user to login before display Welcome page of the "Using Moodle" cource:
But this URL make visitor logged in as Guest and display required page immediately:
Note: if user try to go to login directly from page, opened by this URL, he can't do it because login page will be return him to that URL back and relogin to Guest again. It can be frustrating, and because this, use this method only in links for really external visitors.
See also
Using Moodle forum discussions:
