Moodle: Hide or show sections and items

Moodle lets Instructors of record and Other editing teachers hide sections, activities, and resources, so that they are invisible to students, but still visible to anyone with an editing or non-editing teacher role. If a course is guest-accessible, hidden items will be also be hidden from guests.

Before you start, you need:

an Instructor of record or Other editing teacher role in a Bryn Mawr Moodle course

Manually hide/show course elements

To hide sections, activities or resources on a course page from all students until you manually choose to unhide them:

Click the Turn editing on button in your course.
Click the Edit 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 your user name at the top of the screen, choose Switch role to … and choose Auditor to view the page as a student.
When you are ready to unhide the item, click the Turn editing on button, click the Edit link next to that item, and choose Show.

Set course elements to auto-hide/unhide at a specified time

You can use the Restrict Access settings to hide sections, activities, or resources invisible for a limited period of time and automatically unhide them outside of that period. 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. To do this:

Click the Turn editing on button (if it isn’t on already).
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).
Scroll down and 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.