moodle-availability_cohort
Moodle availability plugin which lets users restrict resources, activities and sections based on cohorts.
Requirements
This plugin requires Moodle 4.5+
Motivation for this plugin
If your teachers want to restrict activities / resources / sections in their course to a subset of the course participants and these course participants share a common cohort, this plugin is for you.
Have a look at an example:
- The Moodle instance provides cohorts for each study subject and groups all students with the same subject in the corresponding cohort.
- Tim Teacher is an editing teacher in course A.
- If Tim wants to provide activities / resources / sections only for the students of a specific study subject, for example informatics, there is no possibility to achieve this with Moodle core functionality.
With availability_cohort, Tim can do this easily. He is just able to restrict his activities / resources / sections to a certain cohort and only the members of this cohort get access to the activities / resources / sections.
Installation
Install the plugin like any other plugin to folder /availability/condition/cohort
See http://docs.moodle.org/en/Installing_plugins for details on installing Moodle plugins
Usage & Settings
After installing the plugin, it is ready to use without the need for any configuration.
Teachers (and other users with editing rights) can add the "cohort" availability condition to activities / resources / sections in their courses. While adding the condition, they have to define the cohort in which students are a member in to access the activity / resource / section.
If you want to learn more about using availability plugins in Moodle, please see https://docs.moodle.org/en/Restrict_access.
Capabilities
This plugin does not add any additional capabilities.
Scheduled Tasks
This plugin does not add any additional scheduled tasks.
How this plugin works / Pitfalls
We created this availability plugin to ease the use case which is described above. The availability plugin just checks if the user is in the given cohort and, if yes, grants access to the restricted activity.
Theme support
This plugin is developed and tested on Moodle Core's Boost theme. It should also work with Boost child themes, including Moodle Core's Classic theme. However, we can't support any other theme than Boost.
Plugin repositories
This plugin is published and regularly updated in the Moodle plugins repository: http://moodle.org/plugins/view/availability_cohort
The latest development version can be found on Github: https://github.com/moodle-an-hochschulen/moodle-availability_cohort
Bug and problem reports / Support requests
This plugin is carefully developed and thoroughly tested, but bugs and problems can always appear.
Please report bugs and problems on Github: https://github.com/moodle-an-hochschulen/moodle-availability_cohort/issues
We will do our best to solve your problems, but please note that due to limited resources we can't always provide per-case support.
Feature proposals
Due to limited resources, the functionality of this plugin is primarily implemented for our own local needs and published as-is to the community. We are aware that members of the community will have other needs and would love to see them solved by this plugin.
Please issue feature proposals on Github: https://github.com/moodle-an-hochschulen/moodle-availability_cohort/issues
Please create pull requests on Github: https://github.com/moodle-an-hochschulen/moodle-availability_cohort/pulls
We are always interested to read about your feature proposals or even get a pull request from you, but please accept that we can handle your issues only as feature proposals and not as feature requests.
Moodle release support
Due to limited resources, this plugin is only maintained for the most recent major release of Moodle as well as the most recent LTS release of Moodle. Bugfixes are backported to the LTS release. However, new features and improvements are not necessarily backported to the LTS release.
Apart from these maintained releases, previous versions of this plugin which work in legacy major releases of Moodle are still available as-is without any further updates in the Moodle Plugins repository.
There may be several weeks after a new major release of Moodle has been published until we can do a compatibility check and fix problems if necessary. If you encounter problems with a new major release of Moodle - or can confirm that this plugin still works with a new major release - please let us know on Github.
If you are running a legacy version of Moodle, but want or need to run the latest version of this plugin, you can get the latest version of the plugin, remove the line starting with $plugin->requires from version.php and use this latest plugin version then on your legacy Moodle. However, please note that you will run this setup completely at your own risk. We can't support this approach in any way and there is an undeniable risk for erratic behavior.
Translating this plugin
This Moodle plugin is shipped with an english language pack only. All translations into other languages must be managed through AMOS (https://lang.moodle.org) by what they will become part of Moodle's official language pack.
As the plugin creator, we manage the translation into german for our own local needs on AMOS. Please contribute your translation into all other languages in AMOS where they will be reviewed by the official language pack maintainers for Moodle.
Right-to-left support
This plugin has not been tested with Moodle's support for right-to-left (RTL) languages. If you want to use this plugin with a RTL language and it doesn't work as-is, you are free to send us a pull request on Github with modifications.
Maintainers
The plugin is maintained by\ Moodle an Hochschulen e.V.
Copyright
The copyright of this plugin is held by\ Moodle an Hochschulen e.V.
Individual copyrights of individual developers are tracked in PHPDoc comments and Git commits.
Initial copyright
This plugin was initially built, maintained and published by\ Ulm University\ Communication and Information Centre (kiz)\ Kathrin Osswald
It was contributed to the Moodle an Hochschulen e.V. plugin catalogue in 2022.
Credits
The development of this plugin was started on the Moodle DACH conference in Zurich (2018).\ The development team consisted of Kathrin Osswald and Guido Hornig.