So I take it that the option for "Your word for Teacher/Teachers/Student/Students" which was on the Course Settings is now completely gone in 1.7 ?
So if I simply want to do just what I did in 1.6 -- give an alternate name to the Student role in a specific course -- the system administrator needs to create a new role altogether system-wide, and then assign that as the default role for the course ? Even if it has exactly the same permissions as the Student or any other pre-existing role ?
Can someone enlighten me on this ? I hope I am mistaken.
Because, if that is so, that's a LOT of work, especially since there seems to be no way to even copy a role to be the basic of a new role, but when creating a new role you have to start from scratch and set something on the order of 100 settings, and that's a lot of potential confusion.
Don't get me wrong: roles and permissions is much welcomed and a big leap forward, but eliminating the flexibility of simply changing the label for a system roll ad hoc in a course is (or was) extremely valuable for non-classroom courses.
I have a dozen or more cognates for "Teacher" and "Student" in various social style courses, all with the default permissions.
I would very much like to be able to preserve this ability.
- Randy
In reply to Randy Thornton
Re: Roles and the Your word for Teacher/Student function
by Big Faced Boy -
I am having the same problem - my boss just asked me to change all the "Teacher" references to "Tutor" - but I am unable to do this in 1.7... this seems to be a fairly important feature that has been omitted and I simply do not have time to do this on all my Moodle installations using the manual method described above.
Haven't had a chance to play with 1.7 but sounds like it might be easier changing the language files, if necessary creating multiple local files if you want to change them to different things in different courses but with the same capabilities.
In reply to Big Faced Boy
Re: Roles and the Your word for Teacher/Student function
by Martin Huntley -
In the 1.7 admin, go to Users/Permissions/Define roles and change the long name and (if you wish) short name of the legacy "Teacher" roles to "Tutor" (note the two editing and non-editing versions of the role).
I believe that's how you're now intended to change the names of these roles on a site-wide basis.
What now appears to be harder is changing these legacy role names on a course by course basis. I think this requires new roles to be defined as clones of the legacy roles, with these new roles then used in assigning roles for courses that need them. Since there's currently no way to clone and then modify an existing role, this is a bit laborious. And I haven't yet done it to see if there are any "gotchas".
I believe that's how you're now intended to change the names of these roles on a site-wide basis.
What now appears to be harder is changing these legacy role names on a course by course basis. I think this requires new roles to be defined as clones of the legacy roles, with these new roles then used in assigning roles for courses that need them. Since there's currently no way to clone and then modify an existing role, this is a bit laborious. And I haven't yet done it to see if there are any "gotchas".
In reply to Martin Huntley
Re: Roles and the Your word for Teacher/Student function
by Big Faced Boy -
Thanks for the reply, Martin. I think this still needs some development work, for instance, I'd like to call all teachers "tutors", but cannot duplicate the name for both non-editing and editing teachers, for obvious reasons. I'd like to see this changed so that all teachers may have an admin-specified generic name that is visible to students. A second, alternative name could then be specified for each role that would be visible to other teachers and admins to show who has which rights... Students do not need to know if a teacher is an "editing teacher" or not.
In reply to Martin Huntley
Re: Roles and the Your word for Teacher/Student function
by Randy Thornton -
Martin,
Yes, what is missing the ability to for a teacher to simply change the labels for the roles for a course.
In 1.6, in the database, these labels are columns in the mdl_course table, i.e.
"teacher, teachers, student, students" will hold whatever text values are set for them, and so are simply aliases for those two standard predefined system roles.
These columns and values still exist in 1.7 in the course table, but from my testing (er, fiddling around), it seems that even if you go into the database and change them, they won't show up anywhere in the course; the role names are used instead, which makes sense. (Except in the Participants block (clearly a bug), where only the legacy roles Teachers and Students appear.)
I understand why the developers would want to remove this in 1.7, since in a real sense, there is no knowing what the various system roles will be anymore, except the system wide "default role for users in a course" setting. So mapping the labels in a course to system roles is not a simple one-to-one deal like it used to be. (And from the way the role database tables look, this is a work in progress.)
However, in a typical course, there will still only be two or three roles in use. It would be VERY nice to restore the ability of teachers (and not just admins) in a course to simply relabel for themselves the few roles they do use in a course.
-Randy
Yes, what is missing the ability to for a teacher to simply change the labels for the roles for a course.
In 1.6, in the database, these labels are columns in the mdl_course table, i.e.
"teacher, teachers, student, students" will hold whatever text values are set for them, and so are simply aliases for those two standard predefined system roles.
These columns and values still exist in 1.7 in the course table, but from my testing (er, fiddling around), it seems that even if you go into the database and change them, they won't show up anywhere in the course; the role names are used instead, which makes sense. (Except in the Participants block (clearly a bug), where only the legacy roles Teachers and Students appear.)
I understand why the developers would want to remove this in 1.7, since in a real sense, there is no knowing what the various system roles will be anymore, except the system wide "default role for users in a course" setting. So mapping the labels in a course to system roles is not a simple one-to-one deal like it used to be. (And from the way the role database tables look, this is a work in progress.)
However, in a typical course, there will still only be two or three roles in use. It would be VERY nice to restore the ability of teachers (and not just admins) in a course to simply relabel for themselves the few roles they do use in a course.
-Randy
In reply to Randy Thornton
Re: Roles and the Your word for Teacher/Student function
by Trine Michelsen -
Hi Randy
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who can't find this option in the 1.7 version! I was going crazy looking through all the new options without being able to locate where to change it. The only option now as I see it is changing "yourwordfor" for instance student directly in moodle.php but this gives you the same word for each role throughout the entire site and not the option of giving every role a different label in each course... In my case the "teachers" are coordinators - if I change it in moodle.php I can have only one or the other - either teacher or coordinator...
It would be great to restore this option and let us assign our own word for students, teachers, etc for each course!
Trine
In reply to Randy Thornton
Re: Roles and the Your word for Teacher/Student function
by Robert Brenstein -
IMHO, the way to add more sanity to roles would be to create a second context (role category if you will) for them.
If each role was categorized as admin, teacher, or student role (regardless of actual range of capabilities), Moodle's code could use either the specific role name or the role category name as appropriate in a given circumstance.
This would specifically allow us having back generic labels for teachers and students in a course while keeping actual role names more matching their capabilities.
Cf http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=59900#274302
I also think that such a categorization could be used to delineate course-level and site-level roles more clearly -- it would essentially give us the functionality equivalent to former isadmin() and isteacher() except it would be now isadminrole() and isteacherrole().
If each role was categorized as admin, teacher, or student role (regardless of actual range of capabilities), Moodle's code could use either the specific role name or the role category name as appropriate in a given circumstance.
This would specifically allow us having back generic labels for teachers and students in a course while keeping actual role names more matching their capabilities.
Cf http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=59900#274302
I also think that such a categorization could be used to delineate course-level and site-level roles more clearly -- it would essentially give us the functionality equivalent to former isadmin() and isteacher() except it would be now isadminrole() and isteacherrole().
In reply to Martin Huntley
Re: Roles and the Your word for Teacher/Student function
by Tux McKloud -
Martin Huntley wrote:
"...I think this requires new roles to be defined as clones of the legacy roles, with these new roles then used in assigning roles for courses that need them. Since there's currently no way to clone and then modify an existing role, this is a bit laborious..."
"...I think this requires new roles to be defined as clones of the legacy roles, with these new roles then used in assigning roles for courses that need them. Since there's currently no way to clone and then modify an existing role, this is a bit laborious..."
That's the first thing I wanted to do was clone a role and make changes rather than printing out the entire list. I observed the following:
In, >Administration>> Users>> Permissions>> Define roles
Manage Roles tab, if you hover over the 'Edit' icon, the URL is:
http://yourdomain/admin/roles/manage.php?action=edit&roleid=2
where, roleid is Teacher.
(psuedo code): Duplicate the edit action in the manage.php and call it 'clone' action, get the highest roleid number and add one to it, copy all permissions to new roleid, change name to 'cloneof_Teacher', then go to http://yourdomain/admin/roles/manage.php?action=edit&roleid=new_role_id
I haven't jumped into manage.php yet, but I'm willing to give it a try. I'm running 1.7+. If anyone else has made any progress, please reply or send me a message.
In reply to Tux McKloud
Re: Roles and the Your word for Teacher/Student function
by Kevin Audleman -
What about allowing the name of a role to be overridden in a specific context? For example if I had a tutors section, I would go to Roles->Override roles, and rename 'Teacher' to 'Tutor'.
I think this would afford the same level of functionality of the old Your Word for Teacher/Student. It would also prevent site maintainers from having to duplicate roles.
Another reason NOT to duplicate roles: if you decide to make a change to what students can do, you don't want to have to make it to several roles.
Kevin Audleman
I think this would afford the same level of functionality of the old Your Word for Teacher/Student. It would also prevent site maintainers from having to duplicate roles.
Another reason NOT to duplicate roles: if you decide to make a change to what students can do, you don't want to have to make it to several roles.
Kevin Audleman
In reply to Kevin Audleman
Re: Roles and the Your word for Teacher/Student function
by Séverin Terrier -
I just want to say that i'm totally OK with all you've proposed : that would be a cool enhancement, to get again the <= 1.6 functionnality 
Hi,
Well seen, well said, I vote for it !
Well seen, well said, I vote for it !
In reply to Fred Quay
Re: Roles and the Your word for Teacher/Student function
by Ralf Hilgenstock -
Look at the bug tracker: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-8249
In reply to Randy Thornton
Re: Roles and the Your word for Teacher/Student function
by Cândido Pereira -
Can we have hope that this will be (re)implemented in moodle 1.7 or must we wait for moodle 1.8?
In reply to Randy Thornton
Re: Roles and the Your word for Teacher/Student function
by Scott Garrigan -
Thanks to all for posting on this issue ... it doesn't seem to be updated in the docs. I use Moodle to support foreign language instruction, so in v.1.6 I changee the teacher and student labels to reflect their names in the language being learned. The Japanese teacher, for example, was "sensei". I also would love to see the capability restored to change the role name by course. If anyone succeeds in a work-around, I'd love to hear about it.
Thanks, --Scott
Thanks, --Scott
Hi All
I have just upgraded from 1.6 to 1.8 and am running into the same problems. I have various 'courses' on my moodle site.
One course has 'teachers' called 'trainers' and 'Students' called 'Teachers Assessors' (a course for teachers to learn stuff)
Another has 'teachers' called 'mentors' and 'students' called 'students'
Yet another has 'teacher' called 'chairperson' and 'students' called 'members'.
I have been going round in circles for the last day and a half comparing my 1.6 moodle with my 1.8 moodle trying to work out how the hell to do this in 1.8.
Please Please Please bring this option back to the course/admin/settings as it was before.
regards
John