One of the interesting new features that will be coming soon in Moodle 2.0 is the ability to create conditional activities. This will allow teachers to make the availability of activities dependent on conditions such as marks obtained for or the completion of another activity.

While Moodle 2.0 is currently still in development, it is possible (with a little tweaking) to set up something equivalent in the version of Moodle that we are using.   This has been introduced in a first year core Maths unit as a means of making the availability of an assignment submission point dependent on a student submitting correct answers in a quiz. The quiz is used to check that the functions that students have written are correctly calculating the anwers to specific mathematical questions before they are able to hand in their completed code as an assignment. The tutor’s attention is then immediately drawn to those who haven’t submitted and therefore don’t have a working program.

Such conditionality could also be used to require students to:

  • check specific understanding of terms/content before opening an online submission point
  • confirm understanding of a plagiarism declaration/assessment offences before submitting work
  • route students through to differentiated learning resources dependent on their achievement in a test

How to set up a conditional assignment submission point:

  • Create an assignment in the very end topic of your unit on Moodle.
    • If you need to change the number of topic sections you have in the course go to Administration, Settings.
    • Click on Save and Display when you’ve completed the set up page and you will see your assignment submission point
    • Copy the URL of the assignment activity you’ve just created from the address bar at the top of the page (eg http://moodle.bath.ac.uk/mod/assignment/view.php?id=156426)
  • Create a quiz activity in your course.
    • In the Review Options untick all Answers
    • In Feedback, set the first Grade Boundary as 100% and in the Feedback for this grade add some text such as “Well done, you may now submit your assignment here” and link this to the URL of the assignment activity you copied earlier
    • Set a second Grade Boundary of 99.99% with Feedback “Sorry, you need to answer all questions correctly to be able to submit your assignment”.
    • Set the quiz questions
  • Hide the assignment submission point so that students can’t accidentally stumble across it
    • Switch off the Gradebook (in Admin, Settings)
    • Hide the Activities block (Turn Editing On, click on the eye icon at the top of the Activities block)
    • Hide the final topic section of your course (eg in Admin, Settings change the number of topics from 10 to 9 if your assignment has been set up in topic section 10)

Further help and information:

  • For more detailed guidance on setting up an assignment see here.
  • For help with creating quizzes in Moodle see here.
  • Find out more about the conditional activities planned for Moodle 2.0 here.