Moodle

From Robert (rjb at robelko.com) Friday, 17 February 2006, 01:51 AM:

There is a lively discussion on this topic http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=39590

Some recent discussions on related issues make me think of this some more and I concluded that instead of 3 states, which may be confusing to some users, it may be better to have two separate flags, one controlling whether resources/activities are visible and another whether they are active. Then, the instructors will clearly see both states as icons (in edit mode) and as gray whether invisible or inactive (I would seriously consider including the state icons – only as markers not as buttons – after the title for people with editing rights).

Usage scenerios:

Visible and active – the obvious usage – we have it now.

Invisible and inactive – the obvious usage – we have it now.

Visible but inactive – give us accountability and predictability when needed. For example, students have to take 4 quizzes or whatever throughout the semester. I can make all of them visible, so students know what awaits them, but make only one active as needed. This will couple particularly well with using conditional activities. Right now, we make them group activities with no students being in a group the activities are assigned to, but the message (when trying to open the closed activity) is confusing to most students and we must fiddle with groups to make them active. Other people mentioned other scenerios on the forums.

Invisible but active – gives us more flexibility for less typical usage scenerios. For example, we use moodle to sign students up for an exam. Most students use a choice but some have to use a dialog and be manually signed by the instructor. We have a webpage resource which explains who does what and why and include there links to choice and to dialog. To avoid students seeing them on the front page, we use the trick (used by many others) of having an extra topic with these activities with the count of topics is set to one less. They still show, however, in activities block. Another usage for us is offering a print version of specific ressource: we have information amended and formatted different ly and that extra resource is a link from the resource for online reading. There are quite a few discussions on the list for dealing with such situations.

Here's another use case for "Invisible but active." If I want to give a participation grade for an ungraded activity like Glossary or Wiki, I am forced to create an offline assignment. The only way to get the offline assignment to show up in the gradebook is to make it visible. The students see the assignment and are confused. There is a workaround of moving such resources and activities to an unseen topic block (beyond the number of topic blocks currently showing). The invisible but active state would avoid this workaround.

I suggest that Moodle could let access to unseen links or sections when called from within activity, ...so as to let us course creators manage our backoffice raw stuff unseen from frontclass, with chosen activities and resources yet usable by "delivered" activities. After investigating some means to manage backoffice and frontclass, this function shows both savy and congruent.

This issue keeps coming back over and over. A recent discussion:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=62201

"This issue keeps coming back over and over". Another recent discussion:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=64499

Corrected affected version.

The OU has implemented a feature called "stealth mode" that satisfies this requirement. Sam Marshall has volunteered to contribute the code to Moodle. See http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=72887#p325835

This "Stealth Mode" concept sounds to become a great tool. For example a weelky course setup in full can be in an unmanned mode where hidden weekly sections are displayed automatically to students. A month long course can run for a very long time and would have student enrolling for the lenght the course is alive.

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=73515

To achieven invisible but active, you can increase course length, add activities on the last topic/week then decrease course length. The activities will disappear, but if you know their URLS they can I think still be accessed. (This is probably given in one of the threads above).

Timothy- the purpose of this proposal is exactly to avoid using this workabout among others. Its deficiencies are widely discussed in the threads. The functionality has been requested over and over, over the years, and it would be nice to have it properly implemented.

John- the "stealth mode" is definitely a useful development and in the right direction but in my mind does not go far enough. I wonder whether it could be extended to the full implementation of the two-flag system discussed in this entry (cf. my 1st comment not the bug description). Granted, it would require more core changes.

Would the 'stealth mode' as it is now be a good basis on which to build additional facilities? It would be a very welcome addition as it is.

The two-flag idea sounds good - definitely in 2.0.

Does anyone have any code to implement a stealth option that they would be willing to share? I'll be working on some kind of customization as I have to have some kind of fix for this - otherwise my courses will be pretty unmanageable.

I'm heartened to see Martin say "definitely in 2.0."

We have an issue where students are skipping clearly marked lessons (perhaps thinking they are titles of the topic block) and jumping into activities (we label them "exercises") with no preparation.

"Invisible but active" would be good. We are weighing the current option now of moving the activities to an invisible block. That's not too inconvenient for the 25 or so activities, but it would be a strain for large/longer courses.

How many people who voted for this are actually looking for "conditional activities"? ie where certain activities/resources only become available when certain other ones have been "completed" (with all sorts of different way to "complete" something).

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Conditional_activities

If so, please "unvote" this issue here, because condtional activities WILL be in 2.0 for sure already. see MDL-15497

For me this issue has nothing to do with conditional acitivities. Those are complimentary if anything.

Martin,
I totally agree with Robert that this issue is completely different from the "conditional activities" issue.
Joseph

"Active" state would have a differente behavior depending on the module. For instance, on a Quiz it should be tied to the visibility date range (already present in Quiz setup). This makes me think that the needed functions should be overrided individually by every module.

Pablo, the module-level functionality would not be affected by any of this. The function of the flags is to control visibility and accessibility at course level. Modules could check those flags and function accordingly, if some enhanced or alternative behavior is appropriate or desired.

I can give a use case:

I have a Moodle course in which I have a choice (or quiz, or resource, or anything really) that I want people to access from only within a web page resource. I want to add a link to it from within the web page but I don't want it to show up on the course page, since that will (a) lead to confusion if someone jumps straight there and (b) look messy on the course page, since I don't want it to appear as its own entity but instead as something that is a sub-element of another resource.

At the moment the best I can do is to have a topic at the end as a 'dumping ground' for any such activities. If I hide the topic then it also hides all activities, so unless I have an activity being visibly displayed on the course page then I cannot access it. If only I had a way of having some resources and activities in a course that weren't showing on the course page...

Hope this helps,

Mark.

I'm sorry to only be contributing a vote to this & bumping with a comment, but we have been using the 'hide visible resources in number of topics+1' strategy for a while now and would love to see this feature in core code.

Folks might be interested in the http://development.moodlerooms.com/course/view.php?id=34&page=698 Flexpage course format we developed, as it provides a "Manage Activities" function for adding activities, then only those activities that you put somewhere in a page are visible to students.

Maybe I am missing the point. We already have the function by using hide visible resources in number of topics so what other than bloating code would be gained by coding this as a feature?

@ EL Cooper > "Maybe I am missing the point..."
The case was clearly stated by Robert Brenstein on 11/Oct/06 05:01 AM (that"s a long time ago and many moodle users are still waiting for that feature to make its way to moodle core). There are 61 votes on this issue!
Joseph

Is this fix ever going to happen?! (1.9)

We have our induction on a webpage i created, and link from the webpage to learning resources within a course. I dont want students to see the course page, only the webpage i have created.

Making coursepages invisible but active would be really useful.

Adam

I just read the MoodleDocs about it. The overall thing looks great, just adding some thoughts:

1. It isn't terribly clear to newbies that having a parent activity means hiding from course list (and lot of people doesn't really read help on a things they didn't know what they are for). It may be good to add a comment about it right on the editing page, or change the name of control, or add a checkbox with appropriate name or something....

2. Parent activity combo-box can be hard to use in large courses. It would do good to have a picker icon, which will bring you a course page to pick parent activity from there.

3. Overall thing has something in common with Conditional activities (at least hiding an activity from course list), so these two parts may cooperate.

Here are some more thoughts, not sure if someone already created a tracker ticket for it as a "feature request" (if that's the case, please let me know the ticket # so that I could add myself to the watcher list):

For sessions (weeks or topics) that the instructor has chosen to hide, in the student mode can the hidden sessions NOT say "Not Available" but instead say instructor-defined things like "This session will open on February 12th" etc (and then automatically become visible on the date/time specified, see attached screenshot). Any thoughts or comments about this idea? Thanks!

74 votes and 26 watchers as of today. I think it's time to implement this!! I currently use the "stealth mode" described by Timothy Takemoto (01/Oct/07 04:25 PM) above, which gets the job done, but is quite time consuming to set up.

Martin, the functionality we seek here is completely different from Conditional Activities, which I'm also looking forward to.

Updated link for Flexpage:

http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=1080&filter=1

Micahel - It appears to have been already re-approved. Let me know if you need anything. Peace - Anthony

Unfortunately this did not make it onto the crowded sizzling hot plate that is Moodle 2.0.

Please keep working on a final spec and let's get it into the next version. I suspect a lot can be done in new course formats too.

Hello, last week I have committed some new code into 2.0dev that shows "orphaned activities" in the course edit mode. This is similar to the "stealth" mode and is internally using the trick with changing of number of available sections.

Please test:

1. increase number of sections
2. add at least one activity into the last section
   # lower the number of sections
3. you can move activities into the orphaned section now
4. if you delete all orphaned activities, the extra section disappears

Thanks for all your ideas.

Petr Skoda

Petr,

Its great that this functionality is available, but how come its been done in a way which requires me to perpetuate the kludgey way we've had to do it in the past? I'm thinking about how I'd train people to use the above workflow, and all I can think of is them looking at me and asking 'why can't I just set a topic to be an orphaned section rather than having to be upping and downing course sections first?'.

I'd also say that this isn't as good a solution as just being able to mark activities as being in 'stealth' mode simply by having a third state (along with open and closed) like you can do by clicking on the 'groups' icon which would let me have both stealth and normal activities in the same topic, and I can also see problems with the navigation trail when I am displaying an activity within a 'stealth topic' as one of the links in the path will effectively be unreachable (I assume).

Sorry to be so negative, but hope this helps anyway.

Mark.

Mark - The goal was to maintain the behavior that users had in 1.9, not necessarily to develop a solution to the whole available vs. visible question. Petr is just asking that we test to ensure that we have the same functionality in 1.9. The issue will remain open as we move toward some resolution of how best to handle this. In my mind, this type of improvement is something that would be consistent with improving the activity modules in Moodle 2.1. Peace - Anthony

Good good, just wanted to be clear that this wasn't being seen as the 'final solution' - thanks for the quick response and sorry about the whining, Petr!

I am not sure why the kludge which is working without changes to moodle is being glorified by being coded into moodle, even if that is not meant as a permanent solution. also, will the new code work when there are already sections with resources/activities that are beyond visible sections?

Robert - I see it as part band-aid and in part maintaining backwards compatibility. I'd have to test upgrading a site with a course and see how it is handled to see how it works with a course that is already that way. I suspect it does. I don't think the "kludge" is being glorified but sometimes you have to keep something around that is less than ideal for the sake of continuity as we work toward a more permanent solution worthy of glory. Peace - Anthony

why not (simply) have 3 state status for an activity or resource (or even a section) :
available , disabled, hidden

If you add the 3rd state you need to define how it is going to work in all other Moodle parts, not just the course page! It is not a minor change, you would need to deal with this in gradebook (extremely tricky), navigation, reports, logs, RSS feeds, etc. It might require new capabilities, several parts of code would need to be updated.

Alternative solution is to design this as part of the course format. If the whole point of this is to hide some activities on the course page then I think it should be done in course format plugin only.

Nadav Kavalerchik added a comment - 27/Oct/10 04:33 PM

"_why not (simply) have 3 state status for an activity or resource (or even a section) :
available , disabled, hidden"_

That is what the original poster wanted (algthough not in the exact same terms:
"I would like to suggest to have three states: available, hidden but active, hidden and inactive. "
available = available
hidden = hidden but active
inactive = hidden and inactive
Joseph

oups, i was not aware of that. sorry.

i guess the course format is a good way to solve it.

btw, please see a hack i made to solve it
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-21570

well, no, the original request was for 3 states but if you read the followup carefully, this was changed to requesting two separate flags. It is just simpler and better to control availability and visibility independently.

I don't think that making this part of course format is a good idea. This is a core functionality that should be available regardless of the way course course is being displayed.

Just want to add that course formats will be able to build on the basic functionality requested here, so they will play a role as well, but first we need the core.

I also think that it would be great if the second flag was added to Moodle 2 ASAP even if it is not really used besides being saved and restored with backups. Having that available would let some people to implement and share hacks, which could eventually result in code that gets into Moodle proper.

This issue is affecting MP clients. Please give it priority.