I have come cross many educators who have different ideas of how their blended learning should be delivered online. Moodle is well known for being based on the pedagogy of social constructivism. The core idea of this being that the social group is constructing things for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings.

In a Moodle install to date the learning has also been deployed in a very open ended format with resources all available for all students to use unless manually hidden by a teacher/facilitator. This works well within blended learning environments, but many say this ready availability of resources in pure online environments can create issues when it is important that a certain path or lesson flow be followed.

For many the issue of resources deployment based on a flow or lesson plan has either been facilitated with Moodle’s simplistic “Lesson” activity or through the integration of a third party open source tool call LAMS. (It should be noted that LAMS is also open source and is a Moodle partner). But for many these solutions have either been too simplistic or overly complicated. So a third option has started to rise by demand within the community called “Activity Locking” or sometimes “Conditional” activities. Activity locking allows essentially for resources to be give an “if” statement. Only show this resource to the user if they have met a prerequisite. (i.e: have they red two other resources, have they passed a specific quiz, have they participated in a forum, etc)

Now activity locking in Moodle is certainly not new. The first version was released with 1.5.2, but the demand has been growing for this and therefore it’s visibility is increasing within the community. Now before I go on I need to stress a couple of things.

1. Activity locking is a third party addition, not created by moodle.org
2. It requires administrators to change core files. This can cause issues with upgrades
3. It is a “site-wide” addition and therefore will impact all your courses.

Now if that hasn’t scared you off, feel free to keep reading. If that has made you a little jumpy then try o have some patience. At February’s Moodle developer conference there has been talk about bringing Conditional Activities into the core of Moodle 2.0.

Activity locking has been very popular with those who do pure online delivery of content. It allows for the course creator to set a prerequisite before a resource or activity is shown. Why would we do this? Here are some examples:

• Only show a certificate of completion for the user when their final quiz is passed.
• Only show the next topic when all activities of the current topic are finished
• Only show a forum when specific readings have been completed

You will note that each of these are pitched at the individual. This means that the course view will adapt based on the current position of the user within the lesson flow. Especially when you have various intakes or classes at different stages this can be a lifesaver.

The great news for those wishing to explore the potential of this code is that Chardelle Busch of ProMoodle.com has now completed a patch for those using the latest 1.9 Moodle code.

Useful Resources

• Activity Locking in the Moodle Wiki
  
• Table of Activity Locking versions and their download links
  
• Discussions on Locking in the moodle.org forums
• Activity Locking demo on The Playpen (account required)

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This post is tagged activity, conditional, locking, Moodle