Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Kristina Schneider -
Number of replies: 16

After about 4 hours of trying to figure this out, I'm asking for help. I am using Moodle2.0.1 (Build: 20101225)

Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles. They can see the basic profile, but not the full profile. Here is how things are currently set up:

  • I have a set of students all enrolled in a course. There are no groups set, so in principle, no student is hidden from another.
  • Student permissions are set to Allow for View user profiles > moodle/user:viewdetails
  • In the user's profile, the Allow only other course members to see my email address is set, and yet, no once can see them. I even tried setting it so that everyone could see their email address and still nothing.
  • I have created some custom user profile fields and they are all set to Visible to everyone, and yet, no one can see them.

That said, all users can see the full profile of Teachers enrolled in the course.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong? It is essential that they can see this information.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Kristina

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In reply to Kristina Schneider

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Colin Fraser -
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I am sorry, but I do not understand why would anyone want Students to see the full profile of all other Students and Teachers. Besides that, I seem to recall seeing something sometime back that with the various privacy laws around the world that it was being argued that it is better to prevent this kind of thing by not allowing anyone access to this level of detail below the Teacher Role. I may not be recalling it correctly, a brief search has not revealed anything, but I seem to remember that debate actually got a little warm. I also seem to recall that someone was trying to link Teachers and Admins to the privacy side of it, but one argument was that Students should not have an "expectation of privacy" from anyone in a position that has a "duty of care"  towards that student. Essentially, every teacher has a "duty of care" to all students. (These are terms used under Common Law that have not been extinguished by legislated laws, but have been employed by the law makers, in this country anyway.) In this country, as I understand in Canada as well, Common Law is still a major part of the jurisprudential practice in our societies. Legislation has extended those levels of responsibility to include Privacy laws in many nations around the world. On one hand it is fabulous we have a rapidly improving technology, but on the other, it sucks because that same technology can be easily used to invade our privacy, defraud us and otherwise wreck our lives. I am pretty sure that you are going to be struggling to get it to work as you want it. BTW, the term "student" is not limited to minors, it seems to include anyone who may be considered to be "receiving instruction" or in a formal or informal "student-teacher" relationship.

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In reply to Colin Fraser

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Kristina Schneider -

Hi Colin,

Thank you for responding, however, I believe that you are misinterpreting my question. I'm taking about a glitch (I think) and not circumventing any privacy issues. FYI, none of the information I'm wanting to share would break any privacy laws.

The reason why I want students to see the full profile of other students is because I've created custom fields which were meant to be shared. I've also set some fundemental moodle settings to make visible to all and they aren't.

I'd like to re-emphasise that the fields I want people to see are the profile fields I've created which I've marked visible to everyone, which are not showing up visible to everyone. Perhaps this was meant to be seen in the regular profile view?

profile field visible

In addition, I am taking about the email address which I've listed as visible to anyone in the course.

email display visible

If anyone has insights as to why this would not work as configured, I'd be very grateful.

** In the graphics, inputed should be inputted **

Many thanks,

Kristina

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In reply to Kristina Schneider

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Kristina Schneider -

I realise that there is a possibility that none has a solution for me and that's ok.

However, can someone at least indicate to me:

  1. if they experience the same thing, or not.
  2. whether or not they think this is a glitch, or not.

Many thanks
Kristina

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In reply to Kristina Schneider

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Kristina Schneider -

Can some tell me how I can get a hold of the head programmers to report a bug please?

Thanks

Kristina

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In reply to Kristina Schneider

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Glenys Hanson -

Hi Kristina,

You need to go to the Tracker, create yourself an account there (it's not the same as for these forums), then click on the Issues tab and select Create Issue.

You might use "Search for issues" first to see if your problem has already been reported.

Have you already done a Google search to see what it comes up with ?

Are you using Groups and Groupings by any chance? I think that affects what Profiles students can see.

Cheers,

Glenys

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In reply to Glenys Hanson

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Kristina Schneider -

Glenys,

Firstly, thank you for your reply. It is much appreciated after a few days of asking for help.

I did many searches before posting here: I've been working with Moodle for about 8 years now and I usually find the answers I need in the forums. Not only did I do a google search but also searched the Moodle forums. There doesn't seem to be anyone else experiencing this, other than someone back in 2005 an his post went unanswered.

And as for groups, I took off the groups because I thought that might be the problem (even if I had visible groups), but that wasn't the case.

Thank you for the information about the Tracker. I will go report the situation there now.

Again, thanks for your time,
Kristina

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In reply to Kristina Schneider

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Mary Cooch -
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Hi Kristina. I wonder if this entry in the tracker is of assistance to you? MDL-24724

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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Kristina Schneider -

Hi Mary,

Close, but not quite. I haven't gotten around to reporting the error yet. We essentially put the participants email addresses in their profile text as a work around for now. But I'll get to posting it, thanks.

Kristina

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In reply to Kristina Schneider

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Doug Orr -

Hi Kristina;

We are having the same problem sad

Have not found the issue yet.

Thanks for starting this thread.

Doug

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In reply to Doug Orr

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by chris dennison -

Just for the record, I'm running 1.9.8+ and control of email visibilty seems to work just as it should.

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In reply to Doug Orr

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Kristina Schneider -

Doug,

I have opened up a tracker ticket here: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-27177

Kristina

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In reply to Kristina Schneider

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Steve Evans -

Yes - I am seeing this problem too - Moodle 2.0.2+ (Build: 20110406).

Steve

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In reply to Steve Evans

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Steve Evans -

I've found a work-around to this for 2.02+

Basically you need to edit the default setting for "Authenticated user" in Site administration -> Users -> Permissions -> Define roles and set moodle/user:viewalldetails and moodle/user:viewdetails to Allow as per this thread by Wiebke Herding.

As Kristina says - this is set correctly for 'Students' which you would think would be enough, but could it be that it is somehow overruled by a 'Student' also being an 'Authenticated user'...?

For me this solves my problem - the only trouble is that then any students can see anyone's profile, wheras I was hoping to restrict them to their own group or Cohort - but I think that is me being a bit ambitious...!

I'd be interested to know anyone's opinion on how this impacts security implications or if there is a better way to go about this (e.g. create clone of Authenticated user..?)

Steve

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In reply to Steve Evans

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Gregor McNish -
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I've been looking into a related situation; I'd like teachers to be able to view full profiles for their own students.

So far, I think the issue is that profiles are part of the system context. Students/Teachers are defined relative to a course, so those roles affect course pages (and the participants view-- /user/view.php is part of the course context).

That's why you have to go to the Authenticated User role, which is defined at the System level, to have an effect on profiles.

So, if I understand it correctly, (and I would be delighted to be wrong), there's no way (outside of hacking the core) to give students/teachers the right to see the full profiles for only those students in their classes.

As a side note, there's also a cfg option in Site Policies to make all profiles public, so you don't need to change the Authenticated user role.

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In reply to Gregor McNish

Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Laura Gay Majerus -

I am using Moodle 2.2.5+ (Build: 20121005). I have the same trouble where the link to Full Profile does not appear when viewing the profile of a participant in the student role. The "full profile" link does not appear on student profiles when viewing as a student, as a teacher, or as a non-editing teacher. I've updated MDL-27177 with my screenshots and experience.

I do not want all profiles to be publically available on the site. I only want people within the context of a course to see each other's profiles so changing the Authenticated User Role or the Site Policies is not a solution for me.

I've since realized that optional fields Institution, Department, Phone1, Phone2, and Address are not available to select as hidden user fields under Site administration/Users/Permissions/User policies. However, the code to publish (or keep hidden) those fields from a user's public profile does not appear in [sitename]\public_html\user\profile.php.

In my case, I'm using those optional fields but the fields are not displayed to the user, let alone to anyone else (even administrators). The only time the user or administrator can see these optional fields is on the Edit Profile page ([sitename]\public_html\user\edit.php). What happened to these fields???

Finally, is there a way to have the user control which data in the user fields they want to share - like opting in to share their email address? I'd like to have their full contact information available to administrators and the users themselves but allow the user to opt-in to share it publically or within a course. Does anyone know how to do that?

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In reply to Kristina Schneider

Svar: Re: Students cannot see each other's full profile of other student profiles

by Johan Nyman -

Hi!

I found this thread when experiencing that course participants cannot see the "Interests" field when viewing another participant's profile.

This might not be the entirely appropriate place to post this, but I will go on describing.

When a course participant clicks a tag in the tag cloud block on the course page, a list of users is shown, all of which have entered the tag in the Interests field in their profiles. If a user tries to click on a user profile, he will get an error message if the user is a course participant. If the user profile clicked on is a teacher, then the profile opens and the interest tags are shown in the profile.

The URL is .../user/profile.php?id=2  

So this URL seems to be able to open by course participants only if the profile to open belongs to a teacher. Another participant's profile seems not to be able to open this way.

When a course participants goes via the participant list, using the URL .../user/view.php?id=73&course=10 then he can see the profiles of both participants and teachers, but without any info about the interest tags - not even if opening the teacher's profile this way.

Any clues as to how to make it possible for participants to click an interest tag in the block, and click and open the profile of a participant with that interest tag, and view all of his interest tags in his profile?

Thanks in advance!
Johan
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