Restrict access to a resource or activity
Moodle allows you to restrict access to activities and resources, making them only accessible to a particular group, or at a particular time, or only when certain conditions have been met. There are a number of different ways Moodle can restrict student access to resources or activities.
Expand the accordions below to learn more
Conditional restrictions based on activity completion, date, grade or group View
Group mode View
Access to resources or activities in past Moodle units View
Moodle allows you to restrict access to activities and resources, making them only accessible to a particular group, or at a particular time, or only when certain conditions have been met.
Restrict access using group mode
You can restrict access to resources and activities to all groups or specific groups with the group mode under common module settings in the activity settings, so that only students within can view and interact with specific content. For example, you may want to restrict a forum so that students are only interacting with the peers in their tutorial, or their peers in an assessment project, instead of being overwhelmed by huge numbers of forum posts.
Scroll through the timeline below to see the differences between group modes.
NOTE: These settings will affect ALL members in groups, including tutors.
Conditional access restriction
You can set up access restrictions for activities and resources, based on Activity completion, Date, Grade, Group or Grouping or a combination of these. For example, you might like to create a make-up quiz for students who scored below a certain grade on a task that becomes available after the initial task. More than one restriction can be applied at a time, for example, only students at the Clayton Campus who have completed the quiz can access a resource. These are called restriction sets.
- In the activity or resource settings, under Restrict Access, select Add Restriction.
- Select your required restriction or select restriction set for a combination of restrictions. In the example pictured below, access to the activity is restricted to students in the Group DEF/SUP S2 2020. It is recommended to click on the eye icon as this will mean only those in the group will see the activity.
- Click Save changes.
- Then click Save and display or Save and return to unit.
Restrict student access to past Moodle units
Students who have completed a Moodle unit with a pass mark will be given the “Past student” role in their unit one day after the end of deferred exams as per the Callista integration. If you do not want to allow students access to past units you can change Course visibility in the unit settings to Hide, if required. This can be modified by a lecturer or designer at the unit level, or by a Moodle administrator at the category level.
- Navigate to the unit you would like to hide.
- Click on the Administration cog in the top right corner of the unit banner, then click Edit settings.
- Under the General settings, for Course visibility, select Hide from the drop down menu.
- Scroll down and click Save and display.
Restrict student access to past activities and resources
If you want to modify the way the “Past student” role in your Moodle unit can interact with content in the Moodle unit, you can modify specific permissions from the Permissions page. This can be modified by a lecturer or designer at the unit level, or by a Moodle administrator at the category level.
- Navigate to your Moodle unit’s Participants.
- Click on the Administration cog in the top right corner.
- Click on Permissions.
- Navigate to the permissions you would like to modify.
- Click the plus icon to add additional permissions for a role or click the trash icon to remove permissions for a role.
- Your changes will be automatically updated.