Adding activity locks

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Activity Locking is a type of condition activity in Moodle, literally the conditions a student must meet to enter a specific activity in a single course. There have been several versions of this kind of non-standard module. The development map indicates a module with similar features will be a standard part of 2.0.

Towards that goal, this page has been moved to the development area of MoodleDocs in September 2007.

Overview of Activity Locking

The basic concept locks a student out of a specific activity until the student meets a score, a time or a view criterion matrix for one or more specific activities or resources in a course. In some versions, there are options to hide the locked activity, or hide a complete section of activities and resources. Other options include showing a progress icon next to completed activities. Some specialized conditional activities locks are based on an overall course criterion matrix.

Example of Activity Locking

Various flavors can be found at the Activity Locking MoodleDoc page. Please be patient, prior to Moodle 2.0, there are several versions of Activity Locking that have different goals and approaches. The examples below come from an Activity Locking 2.1 flavored branch developed for Moodle version 1.6, sometimes called ActivityLockingWithHide-1.6

What does it do?

A picture is worth 1000 words: The student has to take another lesson before entering this one. Activity has kept the student out.

Lesson setting - new view

This will show a few screen shots of a course(s) that uses lessons.

Initial Lesson Setting tabs

In the edit lesson setting the teacher will see The general tab is the standard lesson setting found in 1.6. Those have not changed.

Activity locks tab

The Activity Lock tab looks like this. We are in the 2nd lesson of a 3 lesson course that has a discussion activity. The teacher is determining what are the requirements for entering the 2nd lesson.

Setting tab

The setting tab has: These are visibility settings. Notice help buttons.

Student views

The student view of two lessons, where the future lessons are not hidden. Shows that the second lesson is locked. A green check in the box would indicate it is available.

Again, this page is specific to one flavor of Activity locking. New users should clearly understand that different flavors will look different and at this point, none is "better" than another. This is my (Chris's) first download of this conditional activity in 1.6, so I am still setting it up in some of my test courses. My site administrator has not allowed me to play with the flavor on our production Moodle. :) It looks very different than the above but it works fine.

Documentation