Comments, please: New user Class - Parent

Comments, please: New user Class - Parent

by George Young -
Number of replies: 10
I envision providing access for parents to (only) the courses in which their child is enrolled.  I wish to:
  • login with a new [Parent] button on the virtual school's cover page
    • don't have to create separate accounts for parents
  • ask for userid of their child
    • to filter the course list (see 2nd item that follows)
  • require authentication for that parent user,
    • restrict parents from wandering around the halls and into other virtual 'classrooms'
  • present them with a list of courses that is limited to those the child is enrolled in,
    • make it easiest for them to get to the 'classroom'(s) for their child's courses
  • and give them only the privileges of a guest (i.e. can only read, cannot write)
    • let them only look around
The setting is a K-12 school system.  I'm trying to make it easy for the parents to 'visit' the 'classroom' - they need only to know their child's userid and a password.  We will give them a password that that each parent can figure out for themselves (but hard for others to figure out), something they aren't likely to forget.

Has anyone discussed or worked on this?  What are your thoughts?
thanks
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In reply to George Young

Re: Comments, please: New user Class - Parent

by Zbigniew Fiedorowicz -
I have implemented something along these lines for advisors of students here at Ohio State University.  The only part missing in my implementation is
  • and give them only the privileges of a guest (i.e. can only read, cannot write)
    • let them only look around
(since I trust the advisors not to do something stupid).  But I think that this last item could also be implemented with some minor tinkering with the isguest() function.

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In reply to George Young

Re: Comments, please: New user Class - Parent

by Dirk Grunwald -
I think that something along these lines would be very useful, but I think you'll have to customize the permissions more than you've currently considered.

In particular, in the setting that I'm trying to set up (moodle for a k-8 school), it is more likely that parents will 'join' a class on behalf of their children rather than having the children directly access the moodle.

We're tying to use 'moodle' as a way to manage information flow from the class to the parents; right now, this is done by lots of little pieces of paper that don't make it home in many cases. There's also the problem of divorced or separated families -- all branches of a chlids family need the information from class.

In those cases, the parent would be the 'student' that enrols in a class; linking their account to a student account is useful. I was planning on using email authentication with an enrolment key for security.

We also want to use the system to have kids sign up for school lunch options. I was envisioning something where a parent can act "on behalf of" a student. It might be that it's easier to just use the 'database' module to handle the lunch orders.

I'm not certain how to resolve all of these issues. It might make sense to have a discussion forum for people using Moodle in k-8/k-12 schools.
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In reply to George Young

Re: Comments, please: New user Class - Parent

by arvind grover -
As a K-12 school, a parent account would be a great feature for us. Right now, teacher post all assignments to their own web pages which parents can access. We will be moving some faculty members to Moodle sites, but need an easy way for parents to browse, but not touch courses. I don't even mind having one parent username/password for now. Ideally, each parent would have a username and password that limited them to their child's courses as you stated, but is not the highest priority item.

I think it would also be important to limit the parents' views within the course. Seeing assignments and due dates is fine, but looking in on discussions seems to be crossing a boundary.

Thinking about managing parent usernames and passwords is a scary thought in terms up support, however.
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In reply to arvind grover

Re: Comments, please: New user Class - Parent

by George Young -

Good morning, Arvind,

Thanks for you post, and for expressing your interest in a Parent class of accounts. Your vision seems to parallel mine. 

We too, are concerned about passwords for parents;

  • we're trying 1st to find a piece of information about parents that we have in our student data, information that parents would 'know implicitly' but which other people would not likely know
  • we're also giving thought to a means through which parents can control their passwords autonomously, maybe with a combination of eMail verification and the "forgot your password?" feature; but this would require more modifications, and I'm a novice at PHP and moodle.

But we're committed to doing something beyond Guest to make our iSchool more "friendly" for parents.  I welcome your ideas and any assistance you might give.

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In reply to George Young

Re: Comments, please: New user Class - Parent

by arvind grover -
Our parents have been using our Intranet site for years, but with non-unique usernames/passwords. The movement to portals seems to be the most appropriate and functional way of serving content. Moodle certainly fits in as a piece of that puzzle. Most likely, we will move to a unique-account, portal based system within the next year, and tying Moodle into that would be great.

That would mean getting parents into our LDAP directory. While the maintenance is an issue, I would be great to be able to remove entries for those families who leave or matriculate. You could also port families right into an alumn portal to keep them tied in to your school (we are a private school, so alum relationships are a big thing for us). Perhaps having a communications person or development associate handling parent account/passwords would take some of the burden off the tech staff. I could see that as a good partnership to involve other departments with our Intranet.

I think that having password reset options available for parents would be a must. Many of our parents are low-level users, but allowing more management for the end-user is a helpful timesaver for the support staff.

I unfortunately wouldn't have the resources to program such a module, but would be happy to support and test out possibilities.
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In reply to George Young

Re: Comments, please: New user Class - Parent

by Shane Elliott -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers
You may also be interested in reading the user roles plan for an upcoming version.
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In reply to Shane Elliott

Re: Comments, please: New user Class - Parent

by arvind grover -
the concept of role creation is a good one and will undoubtedly come in handy. the analogy for me is that of permissions on a file system. the demo page you linked to Shane does seem limited to me. in order to design an effectice parent role, one would need want to assign rights such as "read-only." the roles idea is a great concept, but the proposed system seems like it doesn't have enough variables to configure. perhaps it is not complete yet.
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In reply to arvind grover

Re: Comments, please: New user Class - Parent

by Shane Elliott -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers

It is a draft implementation plan. I think your analogy to file system permissions is a good one.

The permissions shown are only as an example. In reality we envisage that there may be hundreds of different capabilities that a role may be assigned. These will be controlled by the different modules (forum, quiz, resources ... ) although there will be core and course capabilities too. This is to give as much flexibility as possible. Eg a parent role may have read-only permissions to all activities in a course except to a forum where they may be able to participate. Or a parent role may have access to a choice module where you can register that they have read through their childs progress. It also allows for a broader range of other roles such as tutors etc.

The concept of user roles actually evolved from the need to let parents be involved in some way.

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In reply to George Young

Re: Comments, please: New user Class - Parent

by George Young -
Ok, folks.  I've embarked on modifying moodle to provide an environment for Parents to visit their child's courses.  My primary goal is to give parents the privileges of a 'guest', but give them access to only the courses in which their child is enrolled. 

I see from other postings that a future version of Moodle will provide innate capabilities to set up such a scheme, but I want it in place for the start of school in September.

I didn't find a way to use the modularity of Moodle to modify it's behavior as one can with Blocks and Modules.  Reluctantly, I'm modifying what may be 'core' components as follows; I welcome other ideas or approaches.
  • /index.php:
    • provide 3 login buttons in the central area, "Students", "Teachers", and "Parents". 
      • The 1st two take the user to /login/index.php for the normal process
      • The "Parents" button goes to a modified login procedure (see the next section)
  • /loginparent (a new 'login' folder):
    • start with a copy of /login/login.php and accompanying files
    • modify index.php:
      • get the child's (student's) $userid and a password assigned to the parent
      • Deterime that
        • $userid exists and it is that of a student (not a teacher or admin)
        • the password given is that of the parent
          • this password is stored in a new field in the 'users' table
      • If the above is true
        • set global variable $PARENTOF to the userid of the child (to be used later for filtering the course list)
        • reset $USER to 'guest' and complete the login process
          • will provide this user the privileges of 'guest'
  • /blocks/courselist/block_course_list.php - get_content() or
    /lib/datalib.php - get_my_courses():
    • if $PARENTOF has a value, then use -it- in the call to as the $userid to retrieve a course list
    • otherwise, use $USER to retrieve a course list
  • I still need to track down how the "userid" and "login" elements in the page header and footer are handled for the "guest" user; I wish to modify that as well so that it acts in the same way as for a regular user.
  • And I will develop a means for maintaining the password for parents.
Critique and suggestions are welcome. 
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In reply to George Young

Re: Comments, please: New user Class - Parent

by Aaron Grill -
Hi,
Just curious.. if I have turned off guest access, wouldn't this method not work? 
Aaron
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