Moodle Educators – Restrict course sections using Restriction by section completion plugin

Moodle Plugins allows you to extend the functionality of core LMS to meet your institution specific requirements. Moodle Plugins are one of the easy way to add new features to Moodle. There are more than 2,000 plugins contributed by the community in the official plugins directory. In this post, we will have a look at the Restriction by section completion Moodle plugin which allows you to restrict the course section until the previous sections are completed.

Moodle allows multiple restriction conditions by default. Restriction can be based upon Activity completion, date, grade, the group or grouping the students are in or even user profile fields. The ‘Restriction set’ button also allows for more complex criteria requiring nested conditions.

You can download the Restriction by section completion plugin from the plugins directory here. Please follow this guide if you want to learn about how to install a Moodle plugin. Once installed it is ready to use without the need for any configuration.

As a teacher you can add the “Section Completed” availability condition to activities / resources / sections in the courses. While adding the condition, you have to pick the section which the student is required to complete before accessing the activity / resource / section.

Restriction by section settings

The plugin is developed by Stefan Scholz who is also the developer for other popular Moodle plugins like Designer course format. The plugin was built to enable teachers to easily restrict activities or sections to students that have completed another section.

There is another way of applying such section based restriction by adding several restrictions but it is too difficult. This plugin simplifies that for the teacher as well as shows only one condition for the students instead of showing multiple restrictions.

What are the other handy Moodle plugins which you are using on your Moodle site? Do share with us in the comments sections below.