Do you want your course page to be more adaptive to particular students based on their performance? Are you interested in bringing some game mechanics to your course? Using Restrict Access settings in Moodle can be an interesting way to make your course page more adaptive to student performance and allow you to differentiate your teaching.
Restrict Access settings allow you to control access to things such as files, links, activities, assignments, and topics in your course. You can access these settings whenever you edit settings for an activity or resource. Restrict Access depends on criteria which include grouping, time and date, grade conditions, and individual users.
Take a look at the video below to see some of these settings in action. When we set up this course, we wanted certain topics to become available based on a mixture of settings (group, time, and quiz grade). This resulted in a “choose your own adventure” format where students went on a “quest.” Depending on how well they do, they will see different content displayed on the course page.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/68849902[/vimeo]
Potential applications:
- Self-paced learning have students tackle certain activities at their own pace, opening up new content once they’ve finished a set of activities.
- Adaptive learning make resources available to students based on their performance on a quiz or assessment, allowing you to funnel students who need additional help toward study-guides or extra credit activities.
- Gaming mechanics make resources something that your students have to work to unlock (like unlocking an achievement in a game).
- Group work make an entire topic of a course available to a specific group of students, allowing you to create multiple tracks within your course for cohorts, group projects, or presentations.
Just as a word of caution, if configured incorrectly, Restrict Access can make it so students cannot see the things that you want them to, so be sure to try it out before sharing it with students. If you are planning out part of your course to be adaptive, consider drawing a map on a piece of paper to plan out what events will trigger resources to become available (This is especially helpful when you want a class split into multiple tracks).
The most important thing to remember in using Restrict Access in Moodle is that students must meet all the conditions you¹ve set in order to access a resource (it cannot do either/or). Typically, it will be easier on you to base access off of a single condition rather than multiple conditions.
*Space image, NASA.