Moodle lets Teachers hide sections, activities, and resources, so that they are invisible to students, but still visible to any one with a Teacher or Non-editing Teacher role. If a course is guest-accessible, hidden items will be also be hidden from guests.
Manually Hiding/Showing Course Elements
To hide sections, activities or resources on a course page from all students until you manually choose to unhide them:
- Turn editing on in your course (use the button located at the top right of your course’s main page).
- Click the Edit link next to a visible item, and choose Hide to hide it.
- Moodle places a “hidden from students” message beneath hidden items to remind teachers that they are invisible to students, as show below.
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- The message is not visible to students; click on your user name at the top of the screen, choose Switch role to … and choose Auditor to view the page as a student.
- When you are ready to unhide the item, turn editing on, click the Edit link next to that item and choose Show.
Setting Course Elements to Auto-Hide/Unhide at a Specified Time
You can use the Restrict Access settings to hide sections, activities, or resources invisible for a limited period of time and automatically unhide them outside of that period. For example, you might wish to hide later sections of a course until the dates when they become relevant or hide a study guide until the weeks before an exam.
To do this:
- Turn editing on if it isn’t already. (Click the gear icon (Actions menu) and choosing Turn editing on.)
- Click the Edit link next to a visible item, and choose Edit Settings (if the item is an Activity or Resource) or Edit Section/Topic/Week (if the item is a section within a course).
- Scroll down and click Restrict Access to expand it.
- Click Add Restriction
- Click Date.
- Use the drop-down menus to configure the date restriction parameters:
- Leave the first phrase to state “Student must match the following”
- The eye icon determines whether you are creating a parameter for when the item will be visible (eye open) or hidden (eye with line through it).
- The from/until menu determines whether the date that follows is the date on which that visibility setting starts (from) or ends (until).
- So in example, if you wanted a course item to be visible starting at midnight on November 5, 2020, you set the visibility to “show” (eye open) “from” 5 November 2020 00:00 as depicted below.
- Click Add Restriction if you need to set additional parameters; in the example above, to re-hide the item on a certain date, you would add a restriction with parameters set to “show” “until” that date.
- Don’t forget to click Save at the bottom of the page to finalize your settings.
When you use Restrict Access to hide elements from students, Teachers will see a Restricted message beneath that item with a summary of the restriction parameters. Students and guests do not see this message.