Controlling Visibility in Moodle

Find Course Categories & General Course Searching
Restrict Access
Home > Welcome to Moodle > Controlling Visibility in Moodle
On this page...
  1. Hidden Content
  2. Know if it’s Visible to Students

Hidden Content

If you’re working on an item that’s a Work-in-Progress you don’t have to have it where students can see it and potentially get confused or worried about the content. You can hide content so you can work on it or explore your options quietly! You can also restrict access to activities (and sections) to prevent students from accessing activities and/or resources until set parameters are met.

NOTE: Hidden activities will affect student grades unless they are set to 0 (zero) points or “No grade” or change your gradebook settings. Otherwise this can upset your view of accurate student grades!

Know if it’s Visible to Students

What teachers see and what students see can vary drastically but Moodle does its best to communicate this feature that you’ll see in a number of places:

Courses

Make Your Course Visible to Students

  • Courses will open and close automatically on the Moodle Start and End Date listed for your course. Please verify these dates are correct in the settings before the start of the term, and if not please contact the OLET department at online@clackamas.edu so we can make sure your course does not close early.
  • If you would like to Show your course before the start date or Hide the course before the end date you can change the Course Visibility.
  • Courses that are hidden will appear greyed out (ghostly) while hidden.

Section

Sections/Topics

  • Default visible to students
  • Will appear greyed out and/or transparent sometimes with a tag of “Hidden from students” below the Topic/Section title and Summary.
  • Visibility can be determined from:
    • Breadcrumbs within activities/resources
    • Main page of course
    • Edit week page
  • Can be changed:
    • From the Edit menu for a week/topic on the course main page (with editing turned on)

Activities & Resources

Activities and Resources

  • Default visible to students
  • Will appear greyed out (text) and/or transparent (images) sometimes with a tag of Hidden from students below the name of the activity/resource.
  • Visibility can be determined from:
    • Breadcrumbs within activities/resources
    • Main page of course
    • Edit Settings page under Common Module Settings
  • Can be changed:
    • By Toggling the visibility of the activity/resource from Edit Settings
    • From the Edit menu for an activity/resource on the course main page (with editing turned on)
  • Available Options:
    • Show on course page: Visible to all
    • Hide from Students: Students cannot see or access this item or it’s associated files
    • Make Available but not shown on course page: (Sometimes referred to as “Stealth Mode”) Not listed on the course page but students can still access item and associated files if directly linked to them or accessed from the Gradebook.
      This option is limited to Activities and Resources.
Make Available but not Shown on Course page plays well with Auto-linking.

If you’d like to increase the control you have over visual aspects of your course you can use Label resources with Activities or Resources that are Available but not shown on course page. This can also be used to reference Activities or Resources elsewhere in your course while within another to say, reference your Syllabus, or point students to the the materials they need to do or have on hand in the moment.

NOTE: Whenever linking to another part of a course within Moodle check your links after every backup and restore! Sometimes links point to PAST courses that your students won’t have access to— mind those breadcrumbs! Some activity types handle this transition better than others, such as Label, Page, and Book resources.

Grades

Grade Items and Totals

  • Default visible to students – this means you and students MAY see different total grades in a class!
  • Will appear greyed out
  • Visibility can be determined from:
    • Navigation breadcrumbs within activities/resources
    • within Gradebook Setup
  • Can be changed:
    • By Toggling Show and Hide within the Edit menu within Gradebook setup. (When hiding a Gradebook Category you will want the edit menu at the bottom where the total is calculated)
    • By changing the visibility of the activity (see above)
View Related Articles
Restrict Access
Restrict Access is a Moodle plugin that can be applied to Activities and Resources and used to limit access based on group, password, completion tracking, date/time,...
Continue Reading
Related Tags
Faculty Orientation Moodle (19)How-To (74)Moodle (LMS) (117)Most Common (50)Overview Article (26)Update in Moodle 4.1 (17)Visibility in Moodle (19)