Guest Access Turned Off for Academic Courses

Guest Access Turned Off for Academic Courses

by Jennifer Spohrer -
Number of replies: 0

Since the period for adjusting registration ended, on Wed evening (Sept 9), LITS ran a site-wide process to turn off guest access for academic Moodle course sites.

  • This may not have overridden guest access settings that teachers locally enabled -- please double-check the guest access settings for your courses and alter them if needed.
  • A few side effects have been reported:
    • Course name changes – the process reset the course fullnames back to what was initially created by Bionic. There was no way to prevent this, but they can be changed back.
    • Course section names changing – in a few cases in which the name of a section within a course was reset to the default. This was not expected, but the names can be manually changed back.
    • Duplicate and "zombie" Announcement forums – the Moodle developers really like the Announcement forum. Duplicates were created when we ran the enable/disable guest access processes and they are also often created when you copy content between courses. You can always delete these duplicates, but Moodle requires at least one Announcements forum per course. If you don’t want to use the Announcements forum at all, hide the last one instead. Otherwise, Moodle will helpfully recreate it for you.
    • Course materials disappearing – if you are using the “Collapsible topics” course format, it may look like course content has vanished. In fact, it is only hidden, and this fix will restore it.

If you need help with any of these issues or have experienced some other sudden Moodle change, please email help@brynmawr.edu. Now that guest access is disabled, we do not need to make any more site-wide changes to existing courses, so any changes you make to fix the issues above should “stick.”