Moodle is the best open source learning management system catering the training and education needs of different sectors. It is serving more than 120 Mn users around the globe on daily basis. In order to meet the requirements of different sectors, Moodle community contributes to Moodle project through Moodle plugins.
Being modular in nature makes Moodle as the most powerful open source Learning Management system. You can plugin a new Moodle plugin and extend the Moodle features. At present, Moodle plugins directory has more than 1430 plugins.
In this article, I am going to share the top 9 Moodle plugins which helps you to restrict access to your courses and activities. In Moodle terminology, the plugins are categorized as Availability conditions plugins. The Availability conditions allow teachers to restrict an activity or section so that only certain users can get access to it.
Availability Restrictions in Moodle Core:
By default Moodle comes with some availability restrictions like
- Date (users can only access activity after specified date)
- Grade (users can only access activity if they have a certain grade in another activity)
- Group ( users can get access to activity if they are a part of a specific group)
- Grouping, etc.
Also Read:
Top 09 Availability Restrictions Moodle plugins:
However, there are some many useful Moodle plugins contributed by the Moodle community which extends the availability conditions. The top 09 availability conditions plugins are (clicking the plugin name will open the Moodle plugins page):
- Restriction by course completion – This availability condition makes it easy to show modules or sections only when a user completed a course. For example, you would like to deliver the course certificate only when the user has finished the course. This is the plugin which you are looking for. The plugin is available for Moodle 2.7 version onwards.
- Restriction by language – Language filters are great, but sometimes they can make your resources and activities very complex. This availability condition makes it easy to show an English resource only to English users and an activity in French only to French-speaking students. Another useful Moodle plugin by Renaat Debleu.
- Restriction by password – Moodle availability plugin which lets users restrict resources and activities with password access. It is indeed a very useful and handy feature to protect your course resources and activities.
- Restriction by course role – This plugin is for you, If your teachers want to restrict activities / resources / sections in their course to a subset of the course participants and these course participants share a common course role.
- PayPal – An Availability Condition to make a PayPal payment to get access to activities and resources. With this plugin you can put a price in any course content and ask for a PayPal payment to allow access.
- Restriction by badge – By using this plugin, the activities and resource within the course can be restricted by a badge in courses or site level.
- Restriction by days offset from start – This plugin adds a restriction based on a day shift from course start or user enrollment date.
- Max Views – This plugin limits the number of views of activities and resources by users. The limit is applied to each user individually and is based on events for the associated context module.
- Restriction by week from start – This availability plugin allows opening activities or sections with a relative week shift from course opening date.
Are you using any availability plugins out of the above listed plugins? Do share with us in the comments section below.
