I’ve noticed a trend, as the new term approaches in many Moodle-using countries, that questions are asked on the Moodle.org forums regarding installation, enrolment of students and the best way to “share” courses between several teachers with different classes without everyone getting in each others’ way. This latter query has appeared several  times in the last couple of weeks. Personally I don’t have a problem with everyone seeing everyone else’s activities. (The students will never see their classmates’ work anyway, and if teachers can view what their colleagues are doing, surely that’s a Good Thing in terms of collaboration and self-evaluation?) But there have been various workarounds suggested, from each teacher and class having their own Moodle course to  the setting up of  metcourses.  However, in Moodle 1.9 onwards, there is another way: Groupings. Groupings act a bit like the Harry Potter Invisibility Cloak and give you the power to make certain tasks invisible from some classes (groups) but available to others, all within a single Moodle course. So  if you don’t want Mr Jones’ class to see what Mrs Smith’s class is doing – or if you want your set 4 not to have access to your set 1 work -and you are absolutely sure that’s a good idea – then this video shows you how:

I don’t know why, because I am not  a coder,  but sometimes you innocently put things into labels and the Moodle Gremlin takes advantage and steals your editing icons. It might  be some code, some javascript, a swf file -whatever it is, it causes panic , all the more so if it happens on your Front Page and the whole world could see you broke your Moodle. I know  – I speak from bitter experience…   There are some step by step instructions in the  Moodle docs but here is a screencast that hopefully will demonstrate how to get back editing rights and defeat the Gremlin. (And thanks to Dan P for helping me sabotage my front page!)

As a follow on to this post where I show how to install the Activity Locking course format for Moodle 1.9, created by Chardelle Busch, here is a short screencast where I have tried to set up 3 activities in sequence that all must be completed with certain requirements. I’ve tried to make it a bit clearer than the earlier one – it’s not perfect but it might help get people started.