Moodle: Hide or show courses and course sections
Last Modified on 08/15/2023 4:50 pm EDT
Moodle lets Instructors of record and Other editing teachers hide an entire course site to prevent students, auditors and guests from seeing it. Similarly, Moodle allows course instructors to hide course sections, assignments, and materials.
Before you start, you need:
- an Instructor of record or Other editing teacher role in a Bryn Mawr Moodle course
Hide and unhide entire course
- Log into Moodle and open the course you wish to hide.
- Choose Settings.
- Set Course Visibility to Hide (if you do not want students to see it) or Show (if you do want students to see it.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save and Display.
Warning: Hiding an academic course during registration confuses students, who may fear they have been unenrolled when it disappears from their Dashboards. Instead, please leave the course visible and hide the sections containing the content you don't wish students to see.
Manually hide/show course elements
- Toggle Edit mode on in your Moodle course.
- Click the Edit (three dots vertically stacked) 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 shown below:

- The message is not visible to students; click on the drop-down menu with your initials, choose Switch role to … and choose Registered student to view the page as a student.
- When you are ready to unhide the item, toggle Edit mode on, click the Edit link next to that item, and choose Show.
Set course elements to auto-hide/unhide at a specified time
- Toggle Edit mode 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).
- 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 for example, if you wanted a course item to be visible starting at midnight on November 5, 2020, you would 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 with a summary of the restriction parameters. Students and guests do not see this message.
You can use this feature to hide sections, activities, or resources for a limited period of time and then automatically unhide them. 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.
Videos & further reading on courses and course sections
Questions?
If you have any additional questions or problems, don't hesitate to reach out to the Help Desk!
Phone: 610-526-7440 | Library and Help Desk hours
Email: help@brynmawr.edu | Service catalog
Location: Canaday Library 1st floor