I seek to request that a Restriction area be placed in the Course Edit Settings page that allows a teacher to utilize all of the standard restriction plugins to prevent/allow individuals into the class.  I think making use of the existing Restrict Access system will lower the training needed to get users to utilize this functionality.

There have been several tracker items that have tried to solve several of the below issues in various other means.

As of today (2/10/2019), I have found:

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-22648 

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-59747 

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-61216 

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-39053 

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-37038 

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-48762

While they all seek to solve this need in different ways, I think it is interesting to see the number of votes on each of them.  Seems we are all trying to solve a central problem.

Usage Scenario #1

Don’t allow students to enter a class unless they have “completed” another class, for example an orientation class.

All students and academic courses loaded from the SIS.

All enrollments are loaded from the SIS.

All students placed in a cohort named Current Students.

Set up an New Student Orientation class. Add the Current Students cohort. At the end have a quiz, with activity completion turned on based on grade.  So once they make higher than an 80, mark the activity complete.  In the same class, have course completion set that the course is marked complete once the quiz activity we just created is marked complete.

In the actual academic courses, go to Edit Course Settings. Go to the new Restrictions area, set to Course Completion and choose “New Student Orientation”.

When students go to the actual academic course and have completed the New Student Orientation, they just seamlessly enter.

When students go to the actual academic course and have NOT completed the New Student Orientation, it says something like This course is not available until you have completed course: New Student Orientation.

Usage Scenario #2

Similar goal to #1 with one caveat.  While many of our teachers don’t want students to enter their class at all until they have completed some prior work, others want them to enter but only be able to see section Zero where they store their syllabus and other pre-class preparation information.  Presumably, if we added a Course Completion restriction they could go to every one of their topics/weeks 1-16 and place that restriction on them one by one, BUT it would be much more useful if there was a way to place a restriction in a class that applied to all of the topics/weeks except section Zero. As to where this tool would live, I am unsure.  Either as part of section Zero’s edit settings or in the course’s edit settings.  (This is very much the same scenario Juan Leyva mentioned in MDL-22648)

Usage Scenario #3

Don’t allow students to enter a class once it is has moved into the “Past” (ie, past the course End Date or course End Date plus grace period), but still have it available on the student’s “Past” course list.

All students and academic courses loaded from the SIS.

All enrollments are loaded from the SIS.

Course Ends

Institution places (programmatically?) course restriction on each completed course that it is only available until X date.

If a student has taken an Incomplete grade and needs to have access back in to the class to complete work, edit the course restrictions to change to match “Any” which changes to OR logic and then add a user profile field restriction for ID Number set to that student’s ID number.

This scenario is similar to the same need as expressed in MDL-48762, though the resolution is via a different means.

Note: Today we change a course to hidden after the course end date.  This accomplishes what we want in that students can’t get access to the content, but it also confuses the students who still expect to see courses they have taken on their “Past” courses tab (which then causes them to generate tickets to IT).

Usage Scenario #4

This is not something we actively need yet, but I saw in MDL-48762 that UCLA mentioned it as a need they had.  It was also mentioned in MDL-59747.  Allowing a teacher to hide a course during a paper exam where they didn’t want students to be able to refer to the course for materials. The teacher could add a Date restriction to accomplish this if restrictions were available at the course level.

Last Note

We enroll students in almost everything via the SIS.  For those few classes that use Self-Enrollment, I assume you would check and reject based on the course restriction before you attempted to let them self-enroll.

Thank you for considering this request

Scott