I am both scared and excited by the new conditional activities in Moodle 2. Though we have upgraded to Moodle 2, we haven’t yet turned on conditional activities. In the main we wanted to ensure the stability of our upgraded system and needed to focus support on those staff having problems with core issues such as file uploading and the very different navigation.
Simply put, conditional activities allow you to “stop” learners doing activity B until they have completed activity A. For example get 80% in a quiz before they get the next assignment. Another example, open the resource before they can do the quiz. It’s a very powerful tool and provides a lot more flexibility to teachers on how learners interact with their Moodle courses.
It is my plan to “turn on” conditional activities at the end of June and follow it up with training in July prior to the start of the new year in September.
At the Ireland and UK Moodlemoot 2012, Becky Barrington from South Devon College gave a presentation on how it all works and how staff at her college are using this function.
What was clear from the presentation was that you can’t just go in and “play” with conditional activities, you need to stop and think about it, you need to plan how the whole thing will work.
Becky did recommend that you focus on using conditional activities selectively for activities over using them for a whole course.
My training will now focus very much on planning over the technical aspects of conditional activities. This demonstrates the real value of an event such as Moodlemoot in making you think and changing what you are going to do based on the real experiences of others.
Hi James, you are probably already aware but ‘adaptive release’ has been available for years in Blackboard and I’ve seen good examples of using it for branching support to personalise courses. My understanding is that conditions in Moodle are aiming to be similar to this
The following might be of interest:
(1) http://ondemand.blackboard.com/r91/movies/bb91_adaptive_release_create_multiple_rules_for_content_item.htm