Using prerequisite subsections to control access to parts of your Open edX course

If you wish to to ensure students don't have access to a part of your course prior to achieving a passing grade on some prior part of your course, you can easily do so by making one part of your course a prerequisite for the other. In Open edX, this works on the subsection level.

Workflow

First we need to enable prerequisite subsections under Advanced Settings, which can be found in the Settings menu.

On the advanced settings page, scroll to or search the page to find  Enable Subsection Prerequisites and enter true as its value.

Be sure to click Save Changes at the bottom of the window once you have set this value.

Go back to your course outline, find the subsection you want to make a prerequisite and click on the Configure (cogwheel) icon:

Click on the  Advanced tab and check the box beneath Use as a Prerequisite to make the subsection available as a prerequisite to other content and click Save:

Now click on the Configure icon for the the subsection you want to appear after a learner has attained the necessary grade on the prerequisite subsection. Click Advanced and select the prerequisite subsection and the required score. As always, click Save.

IMPORTANT: The process of the content being "unlocked" is not something that happens automatically. For the subsection to become visible, your learners will need to either refresh the page or navigate to a different part of the course. This means you should do one of two things:

• Add instructions to your course telling your students to refresh the page.
• Make sure the postrequisite content exists in a different part of the course, requiring learners to navigate away from the prerequisite content in order to access it.