I'd like students to be able to access the first couple of lessons in Moodle before being presented with a request for payment. I've searched for ages on Google and found nothing, and also searched for all the possible terms I could think of here, and again come up short. Apologies therefore for the lack of contributing research/evidence.
I'm using Paypal as the chosen method of payment at the moment. Moodle is version 3.2.
Is there a way to add this kind of option to the 'access restrictions' in the courses themselves?
There isn't an existing way to restrict activity access based on the users enrolment type.
Without writing some custom code, the easiest way to do this is probably to have a separate course containing the pay-walled content, with paypal enrolment set up.
Add an activity to the free course with a link to the paid course. Use access restrictions to hide it until the other activities are complete.
When a user completes the free course content, the link to the paid course will be revealed, and they can click to enrol using paypal.