User talk:Douglas Loomer

Separating Activity Hiding from Activity Access

This is a proposal for separating activity hiding from activity access in Moodle 2.4.+ and beyond.

In its current form, hiding an activity from student view in Moodle does two basic things:

• stops the html relating to the activity from being rendered on the page in Student view;
• prevents students from accessing the activity via the activity's url.

In 2006 Robert Brenstein created Moodle Tracker MDL-4782 in which he proposed a change to Moodle which would allow teachers to hide activities from students yet make them accessible to students via hyperlinking. That tracker has attracted 108 votes and this feature was slated to be added to the Moodle core in Moodle 2.0. However, due to developer time constraints it remains unimplemented.

Basic Use Case

The requests for this feature come primarily from teachers who want to provide links to activities in editable text areas such as Moodle labels or Moodle web pages. Linking to activites in editable text areas allows teachers to create a context for the activities that makes their purpose clearer and potentially more asthetically pleasing than the list format generated in a standard Moodle layout. In the following example, note how links to Moodle activities are presented within the context of the directions for their use.

The Problem Inherent in the Present Moodle Hiding Schema

At present when an activity is created in Moodle a link to the activity is placed within a section of the class page. As a consequence, when teachers link to an activity within an editable text area two links to the activity appear on the course page - their text area link and the link outside their text area which is generated by Moodle. The existence of two links to the activity is confusing and contributes to the Moodle "scroll of death." The Moodle generated link cannot be hidden because hiding both removes the link from the page AND