The Guest access facility allows users with the Guest role to view the contents of a course. This might be used, for example, if a Moodle site serves as a website where certain courses contain publicly available information, or else with a commercial Moodle site where courses with guest access can offers a "taster" of the kind of courses which may be purchased.

Before Enabling Guest Access

Before allowing guests to access your course, it is your obligation to understand student privacy and copyright regulations.

Enabling Guest Access

Course settings for Guests

• From Course navigation, click 'Participants', and then from the dropdown, click 'Enrolment method> Guest access'. With other themes, click Administration > Course administration > Users > Enrolment methods and then Guest access.

• Enable guest access by clicking on the "eye" icon or by choosing it in the 'Add method' dropdown menu.
• If you wish to set a password, then click the configure icon and type in your password here.

Admin (Instructor) settings for guest access

 To allow guests onto your Moodle site

• In Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins, ensure Guest access is enabled (has its eye open.) This enables Guest access.

• In Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Authentication > Manage authentication set the Guest login button to Show if you want the button on the Front page.

• Guest accounts can also be logged by administrators- check the Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Logging > Log guest access setting.
• A site policy for guests may be set in Site administration > Security > Site policies. Guests then have to agree to the site policy before accessing a course with guest access.

 

Auto-login guests

• In Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > User policies, you can tick the box so that visitors are automatically logged in as guests when accessing a course with guest access (i.e. they don't have to click the "login as guest button").

• In Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Authentication > Manage Authentication, you must have "Guest login button" set to "Show".

•  In Administration > Site administration > Security > Site policies you can check "Open to Google" setting so that the Google search robot will be allowed to enter your site as a Guest. In addition, people coming in to your site via a Google search will automatically be logged in as a Guest.

 

Default settings for guest access

• Clicking on Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Guest access brings up the screen where admin can set defaults for guest access in courses.
• Clicking the 'Advanced' button next to 'Allow guest access' will hide this setting in a course and will instead display a 'Show more' link to click on to access the setting.
• Guest access can be turned on by default in all new courses and you can also:
  • • • Require each course with guest access to have a password for guests. (Note: this can confuse teachers who are not aware of the requirement.)
      • Use or ignore your Moodle's standard password policy for guest access passwords.
      • Offer if needed the first letter of the password as a hint.

Guest Limitations

Guests ALWAYS have "read-only" access - meaning they can't leave any posts or otherwise mess up the course for real students.

They cannot:

• Post in forums
• Edit wiki pages
• Participate in a chat
• Take quizzes or Questionnaire (or Feedback)
• Submit assignments
• Add glossary or database activity entries or comments
• Receive any scores or grades (because of the read-only access)

This feature can be handy when you want to let a colleague in to look around at your work, or to let students see a course before they have decided to enrol.

If you want guests to be able to take quizzes, or any of the other activities listed above, and have considered the security implications, you can create a visitor account, say with username = password = visitor, for everyone to share.