Roles

Roles control what one can and can't do within particular areas of a Moodle. Roles are also what powers PRISM's student administration panel, allowing teachers to enter their students as members of a course and still comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA). While COPPA applies to children under 13, PRISM shields student information for all K-12 hidden student members. (Note that K-12 students may not establish full PRISM accounts.)

Roles currently available in PRISM's installation of Moodle include "Teacher, Non-editing teacher, and Student." The "Guest" is also available, but it is currently disabled on PRISM. The Parent role allows teachers to give access to their course via the parents' hidden student member.

Roles also allow teachers to add members and enable or disable many features for students within their courses. But before going on, let me add a word of caution. The Roles feature is very powerful. If you're not careful, you could grant students rights you may not really wish them to have!

The primary way to access the roles function is via the 'Assign roles' link in the Administration block in a course where you have teacher rights.

The Roles panel shown below will appear. By default, you are taken to the 'Locally assigned roles" function.

From this panel you may assign the following roles. Assigning a role adds that user to your course.

• Administrator - Administrators can usually do anything on the site, in all courses.
  
• Course creator - Course creators can create new courses and teach in them.
  
• Teacher - This role is the same as you have as the creator of the course. The rights granted include changing course settings, adding and deleting members, roles, activities, and resources. With teacher rights, one is a system administrator within that course. You might wish to add a fellow teacher to your course with this role when both of you are sharing the task of course creation or co-teaching the course. The next choice is better for when you just wish to give a fellow teacher a "look see" into your course.
• Non-editing Teacher - A non-editing teacher can see everything in a course, but cannot create or edit content.
• Student - A student is a member of a course. K-12 students should be added as members of a course via the Student Administration block. Students may access and complete assignments, quizzes, and other activities added by the teacher.
• Guest: The Guest role is currently disabled on PRISM. Guests may enter a course only if the "Allow guests..." selection (with or without the enrollment key) choice has been selected in the course settings. Guests may view most course content, but may not take quizzes or questionnaires, make forum posts, etc.
• Authenticated User: The default role for all logged-in users in Moodle 1.8 onwards is Authenticated user. The role of Authenticated user does not conflict with other roles a user may have, it just ensures that a user has capabilities that are not assignable at the course level, such as being able to post blog entries and manage their own calendar etc.
• Parent - Roles designed for PRISM Parent feature.
  

The process of assigning roles is quite easy. Click on the role you wish to assign in the Assign Roles panel. Then find the user you wish to assign a role by searching for their first and/or last name, or their email address. Click on their name, and click the "Add" button.

In the screenshot above, the teacher has searched for 'Davidson',selected 'Matthew Davidson', and prepares to click the 'Add' button to give Matthew "teacher" rights in his course.

Up to this point, we've just been adding fellow teachers to our course. The Student role in the Assign Roles panel might be used effectively for adding teachers to a course such as an in-service course taught by a teacher or corporate trainer.

K-12 students should "always" be added to courses via the Student Administration block (hidden student members). The exception to that statement is if you've already enrolled a student in one course via the Student Administration block and wish to enroll them in another course with the same username and password. To do this, please see the tutorial here.

One last item about assigning roles may be useful to you. The blocks on the left and right of your course often carry the "Assign Roles" icon .

Clicking on the icon will allow you to assign roles (and rights) within that item only. For example, if you had an HTML block for homework notes, you might assign a student to be responsible for updating it teacher rights. The student could then update the block, but otherwise would still carry the student role and rights elsewhere in your course and on the PRISM site.

Overriding Permissions

When we first looked at the Roles panel, we were in the default Assign Roles mode. Under the Roles tab at the top of the panel are two links. One is to the default "Locally assigned roles" panel. The other is the "Override permissions" tab.

Most PRISM users will probably never need to use the override permissions function. The default settings in Moodle generally are just what a teacher is going to want for a K-12 classroom. While students may post to most forums and even add new topics, one forum does not allow this action. Each course created on PRISM has by default a news forum. Only those with the role of teacher may add new topics to this forum. For one of our training sessions, I needed to allow the teachers enrolled with the student role to add new discussion topics in the news forum. I'll show you how I did it, as the method is the same for other changes.

Note: The news forum is unique, as new topics posted in it are also displayed in the "Latest news" block, if loaded in a course. You add the "Latest news" and any other block via the "Blocks" block drop down menu. With editing on, just pull down to "Latest news." Any new discussion topic then entered into your news forum will display in the Latest news block.

To override a permission, click on the "Assign Roles" link in the Administration block in your course. Click the 'Override permissions' link under the Roles tab, and then click 'Student'. Scroll down to the item(s) you wish to modify. You may find it easier to use your browser's "Find" command. Since I needed to change the settings for the news forum, I did a browser search for "news."

Your choices from left to right will be:

Inherit: This is the default setting that means "use whatever setting the user already had."
Allow: You grant permission for this capability to people who are assigned this role (student).
Prevent: Removes permission for this capability, even if the users with this role were allowed that permission in a higher context.
Prohibit: This control is redundant for teachers. It's a control for system administrators and is rarely used.

To change the setting to allow students to create new forum topics, I just clicked the "Allow" button and the "Save changes" button at the bottom of the page. That's the way you can override any role listed.

Now some more words of caution: I'd recommend NOT overriding anything in the Core System area. Beyond that area, I'd be extremely cautious about making overrides. Make sure you're not going to reveal confidential information, or allow a student access to change content in your course.

Maybe the even better news is: That's all there is to roles! But...if you're really into this stuff, the Moodle docs on roles contain a wealth of information beyond what I've described above.

As with all of the Moodle Tutorials, if you find an error or something that just isn't clear, please email us.