Remove Activities from Student View if marked "Excluded" in gradebook

Summary

• Project size: medium
• Audience: primary school, universities
• Target users: students

Goals

When a teacher checks the "Excludes" box next to an activity in a student's gradebook (Single View), four things happen that can cause confusion:

• the student can still access the excluded activity on both the course page and gradebook
• the student can still complete/submit the excluded activity from both the course page and gradebook
• the teacher can still grade the excluded activity (particularly if they have forgotten that they excluded it in the first place)
• the student can then see a grade received for the excluded activity from within the activity and the gradebook

This leads to confusion on all ends - student, teacher, parents. My suggestion is for finding a way for the course to not display Excluded activities to students (such as been done with the Completion Progress block). 

The current work around to prevent submissions of excluded activities is to add a user or group override in the assignment or quiz modules; however, this feature is not available in other module types.

The current work around to prevent view of excluded activities is to create a Restrict Access scenario with a group/grouping; however, this must be done for each individual activity which can become cumbersome when dealing with multiple activities, multiple students, and multiple courses. It's fantastic that Moodle allows for this type of customization with groups and restrictions in the first place, but then the course becomes a pile of groups and restrictions on every activity that need to be removed from student view. In cases, these restrictions then have to be removed at the end of the term to prepare for the new term.

User Stories

Ideal Situation:

• As a teacher, I should be able to add a restriction to an activity, and then activity automatically becomes "Excluded" from both the student gradebook and course view
• As a student, I should be able to open my course page and only see the activities to which I have access, as well as, only see the activities from which I am not exempt.
• As a student, I should be able to open my gradebook and only see the activities to which I have access, as well as, only see the activities from which I am not exempt.

Further reading

Forum Discussion: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=403626