Development talk:Conditional activities

Discussion

Different attempts at conditional activities in the Using Moodle Conditional Activities forum; generating a course page for each user requires lots of processing (Martin).

Possible solution (David Delgado): add a conditional activities on/off selection for each course, being defaulted to off. Normal behaviour would be just the same as now, and conditional activities extra processing power would be used just for the courses that would need them. So, we would get the best of both sytems: fast default behaviour (no conditional activities used) and powerful adaptive e-learning posibilities (conditional activities used). Could it be a good solution? Hope so. :-)

Wouldn't it be better to just have a "has conditional activities" flag that was automatically set and unset when a conditional activity was added or removed? (removal would require checking to see if there were any remaining conditional activities, of course) That'd avoid cluttering up the Settings interface with an extra item. :-) (Tony Hursh)

Adaptive learning questions

Current (through 1.6)non standard conditional activity modules use a minimum score.

1. Are we going to allow the teacher a choice to make the cut off a greater than or a less than condition?
2. Are we thinking of expanding the condition to defining a range of scores, greater than X and less than Y? --Chris collman 14:37, 28 December 2006 (CST)
3. Are there plans to create automatic conditionally filtered courses, i.e. The system preventing the enrolment of a user that hasn't passed a course that is requisite to another course?

Some potential ideas/thoughts coming with conditionals

1. Conditional courses. It's a natural step if we are implementing conditional activities.
2. Make conditions pluggable.
3. Annotate the date when an activity/course has been completed (with teacher ref if manual)
4. Can completed status for one user be reversed?
5. Is the duality of having conditions BOTH for activity completion and activity availability good? I always thought about that being more chained, i.e one activity will be available when:
   1. Some "core supported" (i.e. for all modules) conditions (timestart - timeend, (grade - number or percentaje ? have these sense if the activity isn't available yet ??- ...) are fulfilled.
   2. Some activities are completed.
      (but never to specify "foreign" conditions in the "available when" part. That way calculation will be really easier, IMO. And being more "chained" means itineraries can be easily build over conditional activities and courses).
      Summarizing, what I'm trying to say is that I see correct to allow all sort of conditions (hopefully plugable as said in 2) checked in order to consider one activity completed or not completed. Point. And that info (one user has completed one activity) can be used to determine the availability of other activities. But the availability itself won't be able to check pluggable conditions directly, only own core ones (timestart - timeend basically) + completed results from other activities (with boolean possibilities).
6. Agree with Sam about completed stuff, only for informational purposes for users having some capability (originally "teachers" I guess).
7. Switch at system/course levels necessary, like other Moodle stuff.
8. Booleans. Are we always talking about AND conditions or do we need to add OR support. And perhaps NOT too.
9. I can see the "availability" working at least in 2 different schemas. 100% hiding the target activity or showing it dimmed (with explanation).

Eloy Lafuente (stronk7) 05:06, 17 April 2008 (CDT)

Amen to Eloy's

1. Definitely need to be thinking about conditional courses.
2. Boolean at least to the extent that a teacher can create a matrix (go ahead an limit it to x variables) for scores. Can't see time ranges but that is me. Student A has one path open, Student B another and so forth.
3. Hiding things if a student does not meet condition is nice

--Chris collman 10:39, 8 November 2008 (CST)

Time min-max is not part of 2.0 CA

Interesting, I now have a use for a min time spent condition :) I notice that Lesson has a dependency for time spent in the previous lesson. It also, like Quiz, has countdown timer setting, where activities are cut off or at least not scored once 00:00 is reached. MDL-18459 tries to point this out.

Realize that Moodle can not be all things to all situations. Plus crawl, walk, run is absolutely the best way to go. I view conditions like permissions, a potential nightmare. Best to all --Chris collman 08:51, 6 March 2009 (CST)

Dates

Suggested by James Strong

• Date available from
• Date available to

What happens to those activities that already have their own date/time release mechanism - eg quiz, assignment? Is this just duplicating their functionality?

--Shane Elliott 01:33, 18 April 2008 (CDT)

Why two parts?

The way things read from an interface point of view is that there are two parts: Tracking and Conditional. Basically they are one. The tracking is the site administrators portion and the conditional is the teacher/student interface. Without tracking enabled in the context, the teacher/student interface will not be shown? Is that about it?--Chris collman 11:21, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

• This is not the case (er, I think). The interface is explained better on the non-development page Conditional activities. There are indeed two parts.
  1. The first part is 'completion tracking' (aka 'progress'). Per-activity settings are labelled 'Activity completion'. This is used to determine, per-student, whether activities are complete (either by automatic setting based on the student's actions, such as posting N messages to a forum, or else manually by the students ticking boxes). It provides that progress information to teachers via a progress report.
  2. The second part is 'conditional availability'. Per-activity settings are labelled 'Restrict availability'. This is used to hide or show activities. Activities can be hidden/shown based on several factors - currently date, grades, and also the completion/progress information if enabled.

So if you just want to hide things based on date, or based on grades, then you don't need to have the extra completion-tracking interface turned on. From the conditional point of view, completion tracking just gives you something else to be conditional on!

Or to put it another way:

1. Completion tracking: 'Is this activity considered to be complete?'
2. Conditional availability: 'Should this activity be visible?'

Hopefully this is fairly easy to understand if you enable the system and play with it a bit? I don't know, it may be a little complicated...

Sam marshall 12:17, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Sam. I will definitely be playing with it to get my bald head around it. It is just different. I don't know how much more complicated it can be than all the different flavors of activity locking I have seen since 1.5, where some work, some work sort of and others have been left in the wantabe dustbin of time :) And understand I mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone who has contributed to this concept, when I say I am so happy it will become part of the standard Moodle. --Chris collman 12:40, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Checklists

I am trying to understand if this will allow you to create checklists of sub-tasks for students to complete, which both they and the teacher can use to monitor their progress.

To give a specific example, I teach a BTEC IT course that has a number of assignments. Each assignment has a number of tasks in it (and those tasks can further break down into sub-tasks). I am currently using a multiple choice quiz to give the students a checklist to work through as they complete each assignment, to make sure they have finished everything before they submit their work. To be clear - each task/sub-task is not a separate moodle activity, the students would be expected to tick off every item of the checklist, before submitting a single piece of work.

Is the above scenario possible? Or is the manual checking-off of an item only available for a whole moodle activity?

--David Smith 2 08:29, 18 November 2009 (UTC)