Moodle Educators – How to make your Moodle courses read only for students

During the Year end procedures, Moodle Educators needed to make their courses as readable only without any further modification or any new addition of content. This will ensure that the students can still access the course resources without making any new change to course activities. There is a hidden feature in Moodle which allows the administrators to make categories, blocks, courses or course content ‘read-only’.

Since Moodle 3.6 version, there is a new feature added in the Moodle core called as “Context Freezing”. The feature is added as an experimental feature but it is very handy. So, let’s have a look how you can enable and use the “Context Freezing” to make your courses read only.

How to enable Context Freezing

First as an administrator, go to Site Administration > Development > Experimental Settings. Here you need to enable the Context Freezing checkbox. The next setting “Context freezing applies to administrators” will make sure that even administrators also can’t make any changes.

How to use Context Freezing

As a regular teacher, just navigate to the course which you want to make read only. On the secondary navigation bar, you will see an option for “Freeze this Context” under ‘More’.  This will make the whole course as read only. Similarly, you can also make any activity also as Read Only by going to site settings and then using “Freeze this context”.

Here is a video guide from Moodle HQ about the Context Freezing in Moodle:

Disclaimer – Please note that the Context Freezing feature is still an experimental feature and may allow duplication of activities, blocks etc. So, please use at a test environment before using it on your Moodle.