Roles and permissions

A roles icon is needed for each activity/resource that is visible when editing is turned on.

At present one must open the activity for updating and then click the roles tab.

Consider an override permissions icon also (visible by role as appropriate, this may be a bridge too far for complexity).

Ok.... here we go

These are a few things that spring to mind working with lots of real users:

* Most of the roles related terminology (that you mention at the start of the docs page) is meaningless to 'normal' users (read 'teachers'). They should not be subjected to it. In particular 'override' has to go!! It means nothing to teachers and actually (effectively) hides additional functionality.
* The user context is mysterious to almost everybody. It should be very well hidden or (even better) be made hideable by the admin. Currently most users I have seen intuitively assume roles are applied to users, not the other way round, and the User context promotes this idea.
* It's got to get a whole lot harder to break stuff with roles. I think it's a mindset thing, "what can happen if the user does this?". Some additional warnings may be prudent.
* Roles need to be watertight at the course category level. Most of this is nothing to do with roles though, it's missing or dodgy bits of UI. Being able to split up complex sites using Course Categories and Roles is a powerful feature but it's half a job at the moment.
* New feature... move users from Role A to Role B in a context. I see people needing to do that a lot, and if you have loads of users it's a major pain.
* I'm not sure if any of your changes feature this, but it would be nice to be flagged if you assign a user to a role but they are already assigned to a role in a different (or same) context that might affect this. (e.g., making a user a student when they are already a teacher in the same course or already an admin for the site)
* Assigning users to roles as hidden is very clunky, if you even notice the option at all.
* The User Policies administration page (mostly about role defaults) is a minefield of site-breaking potential. I'm not sure what I want to say here but this might need some dire warnings added or simply rethought so it isn't needed.

That's all I can think of for now...

My main advice is

1) To enable the creation of simple checkboxs/drop downs for teachers - these set over rides in the background for the current context - but the teacher just sees a simple 'let students reply to this forum' checkbox.

2) Make an interface for administrators to add/delete/modify these using roles.

IMHO, some of the 'role improvements' still seem to assume that teachers will want to learn how the software works (thus we just need to give them more information) w/as IME, most teachers want to teach using the software (thus we need to give them a simple interface for new users, which can "easiliy"* be expanded by advanced users).

*without writing code.

"Hidden assignments"

This confuses as it's mixed up with thoughts about the Assignment module.

"Hidden role assignment" would be an improvement. Also a label in the interface that signals what the check box is for would be most helpful.

Enrolments vs. Assignment to roles

IMO the terminology used on a rather mix n match basis at the moment. Enrolment is really a pre-1.7 concept, post 1.6 users are assigned to roles. The course settings page hasn't really caught up with this. An example is Enrolment duration which is present in 2 areas - are Teachers "enrolled" on a course?

Another one...

* Get rid of rename roles in a course (it doesn't work properly anyway) and replace it with the ability to change the role name for individual users in a course (it just needs an option in the "People" block, surely?). I think that's what users really wanted (a long lost pre-roles feature).

Hi !

At the moment, it's boring and so time consuming to create n pupils' parents each year !
As a teacher and my school's Moodle administrator, I would like to create pupils' parents semi-automatically : relatively to newly created pupils list, press the button "create Parents", choose one or two parents, automatically enter the first name as "Parent, father or mother or tutor" by default, Parent's Name as pupils' last name +" "+ first name by default, mail address with the pupil's adress by default and go ! the system creates the selected pupils' context role link and default data.

Any other better means to complete the task welcomed .

Thanks to consult us.

OK I sat and read and re-read your so called improvements paper the other evening and thus am even more confused now about roles than I was in the past.

Historically we had an administrator - me, teachers - people who teach and students - people who learn and guests that we never ever used. That was all we ever really wanted or needed here in my small FE college. Now I accept that there are lots of other people who may have other needs and wishes, so presumably that is why Roles were created in the first place; but from our perspective all of our former teachers, who could 'invite' other teachers into their classrooms and invite students into their classroms very early in the year before MIS had managed to catch up with the register system now can't. By this time of the year - everyone had settled down and was doing their thing and the overnight .csv of staff/student changes was broadly empty, so the three key 'functions' (now called Roles) had served their purpose.

The introduction of Roles two years ago has meant that teachers are now not able (without a lot of messing about) to invite other teachers into their classrooms, course creators has given too much power to people who abuse it, non-editing teachers can achieve nothing meaningful - but is the only role permitted to teachers to give to others and becuase of all that kerfuffle two years ago students ceased to use what they viewed as a disfunctional Moodle, and unless we are very careful that problem may arise when we shift to version 2.0.

The solution, adopted summer 07 and now with a full years effective trial behind it  wasd quite simple really - I have one administrator - me

I have created a special role called course leader - which has all the old rights of an editing tutor (no longer really use the standard teacher role)

and I have stuck with the default student - because, by and large, it works for us and our learners.

Rest of the roles I consider to be useless from our perspective so they are not used anywhere in our system.

I have however this year created a new role - Head of Department (HoD)- the idea being that since each course is organised with a category - and each category is equivalent to a Department (if you are in a big organisation read Department as Faculty) then the HoD could oversee any class where the teacher was on a course or sick or whatever and could do their own statistics, but since statistics don't sub-divide at the category level, only the whole VLE or the course, that was a bit of a damp squib, although it does allow the HoD to visit any class, see the participants and support them if the teacher is off, so that bit is working well. 

I think you will take my point, Roles may be very helpful to some but for us pragmatists who just have to work with them, three or four Roles is more than enough and this new and increasing complexity just seems to be complexity for the sake of complexity rather than handy things for real people in real colleges to use.

end of rant

P.S. can someone please look at finding ways of giving us stats at the category level pretty please ?

 

How about Group based overrides (similar to user overrides). This would allow me to limit activities/resources to specific groups, for example specific classes or intakes, that I wish.

A common complaint I here is the lack of ability to limit certain activities to just be used by one group. I see group based overrides as a possible (if not necessarily easy) way of achieving this.

Julian

I have been pondering this since yesterday, because you have all given me a lot of interesting things to think about. I don't many answers yet, but I do have some obervations.

Several of the comments make it clear that we have not stated what our goals are here. How usable do we hope to make the roles system? This is certainly a vital question.

Thinking about setting goals reminded me of about the bit about usability requirements in Mastering the Requirements Process (which I studied as part of OU course M883 Software requirements for business systems - good course if you have the time and money - or good book in its own right - sorry end commercial break). The two relevant bits are:

1. Rather than just talking about 'Usability' it is more helpful to distinguish 'easy to learn' and 'easy to use', or in other words learnability and efficiency. These are not mutually exclusive, they are just different aspects of usability with different implications, so it is helpful to consider them separately.

An example of a system where learnability is key is and ATM, where you go to get money out of your bank automatically. You just walk up to it in the street, and you aren't going to read a manual before using it. What to do should be entirely self-evident. And it says on the screen: 'Insert card'. So you do, and it guides you through the process making it very clear what you have to do at each stage. Actually, 'Insert card' is the convention I am used to from the UK. In a lot of Australian ATMs you have to 'Swipe your card through the slot', but I don't have any trouble using them becuase it tells you that on screen.

An example of a system that needs to be easy to use is my Eclipse IDE. I use it all day, every day, and what I care about is how efficiently it lets me get the job done once I have mastered it. I am happy to invest some bits of time reading parts of the manual, learning keyboard shortcuts, and adjusting the preferences because the time I spend learning and understanding the system saves me time in the long run. The same sort of consideration applied to other complicated applications like Photoshop, which a graphic designer might use all day, every day; or a fighter jet, where you would not expect to fly one without extensive training, but then you need to have split second control over it. (That is a really extreme example.)

Of course a learnable system should not be inefficient. Having to go through lots of unnecessary steps on an ATM would be a pain, that is why there is normally a button to withdraw $100 in a single action after you have typed your PIN. And an efficient system with a big learning curve should still provide you plenty of clues so you can work out how to scale that learning curve on your own with minimal effort - what people refer to as discoverability, progressive disclosure and so on.

2. The other concept is that you cannot specify your usability requirements without some idea who your users are. For our discussion, the key attributes would probably be:

• how computer/web literate are they in general?
• how much time are they prepare to invest in learning about roles in Moodle?
• how do they think about the concepts here? That is, the questions of who can get into which course, and what can they do when they get there. In particular, if you have users who have not used Moodle much before, what words do they use to describe these concepts and what is their mental model?
  

I do have some thoughts about the answers to this, but I am not ready to write down my ideas yet. What do other people think?

I would like to have a feature (if not already available):

Assign roles to a group, instead of individual users. so all members of that group should get the privileges associated with that role

I've just finished the explain permissions bit of this work, and I am feeling very pleased with myself. I think it has come out even better than I was expecting. If you have access to a copy of Moodle 2.0 dev, you might like to give it a try.

Lying in bed this morning I was struck by an inspiration about the override roles page. Well, it may be inspiration, or it may just be crazy. I probably am going crazy. I must have been thinking about roles too long if I wake up on a Saturday morning thinking about them.

Anyway, would the interface that I mock up on Development:Redesigning_the_override_roles_page make the override role concept more understandable by more people?

Because of some difficulties with role assingments and role debugging...

If an course creator creates a new course by default he wil be assigned to this course as a teacher to have editing rights. This is defined in "users>permissions>user policies -> Creator's role in new courses = Teacher".
As far as i understand this is just an automatical done lokal role assignment, so it should be visible within the courses lokal roles. But it isn't, so in past i often lost the overvierw.

Also it should be possible to see wich role/capabilities i have at any point in the system. On my system i have installed the module "me" that shows me my actual role. But, it's only on course level and if i don't have access to a certain course i can not find out my role/capabilities.
Also there should be something like a role-debug-mode, administrated by the administrator, which allows me, if switched on, to see all my capabilities and roles and from which role wich capabilitie is inheritet and so on. This should be possible for all courses and categories even if i have acces or not.
This would make the role debugging much easier to the administrator.

Greetings
Steffen