What are locks and unlocks?

Locking is a powerful tool for ensuring that students meet a set of requirements before gaining access to some parts of your course. The things you can “lock” in your course are

• Assignments
• Badges
• Grade Levels/Grading Scheme

Ways to use locks and unlocks

How they look like on the "Assignment" page

Lock Criteria 

Ways to use locks and unlocks

There are many different ways to use locks and unlocks. Some examples:

• Setting a requirement to earn an "A" or "A+" in a class. For example, if class attendance is important to the success of the class, you can set a lock on the "A" level that a certain number of class periods were attended.
• Specifying that students must get a passing grade on a proposal before getting access to the next level of the assignment.
• Setting up assignments so certain cohorts of students get access to an assignment (using badges and unlocks).
• Students unlock a badge after completing a task by a certain date.

Locks and Unlocks work similarly across assignments, badges and grade levels.  

How they look like on the "Assignment" page

Any visible item with lock criteria will have a small padlock icon next to the name (assignment, badge or grade level) indicating that a student should check what is needed to unlock the item. Below, we have an example of three assignments. Completing the first two assignments unlocks a badge which is required to unlock the final assignment in the progression.

Items indicated with a "key" icon unlock an assignment, badge or grade level.  Hovering over the key lets you (and the student) know what it unlocks.

Similarly, hovering over the padlock lets you (and the student) know what is required to unlock it

Lock Criteria 

Lock criteria can be set by assignment types, assignments, badges, earned point value, and learning objectives.  Available states to unlock something for each type:

Assignment Type

• Number of assignments completed
• Minimum points earned in an assignment type

Assignments

• Whether or not the assignment was submitted (Submitted)
• If a student has read the feedback given on an assignment after grading (Feedback Read)
• Minimum points earned on an assignment (Grade Earned)
• If a student has passed an assignment

Badges

• Number of times a badge has been earned

Earned Point Value

• Minimum number of points in the class (across all assignment types and badges)

Earned Point Value

•      Whether a learning objective has been achieved  

Optionally, all locks and unlocks can be constrained by date.

Ready to try it out?  Take the next step - set up some locks on an activity.