Teaching with Moodle

It never ends

I can't think of an easy or obvious way to do this, sorry. Perhaps if you can say a bit more about what you want to achieve, we could offer some alternative suggestions?

Hi Debbie,

As Mary said, no easy way to achieve this, but I played around in my sandbox (a fresh install of 2.9) and I was able to achieve what you are looking for. It’s a lot of steps, so it’s not simple, but this worked for me.

Two Things to keep in mind:

• This is dependent on how your role permissions are already set up, so the follow steps should account for that. Try this out in your sandbox first.

• For teachers to be able to see the “Turn Editing On” on the front page (even if you lock down everything to where they can only edit a specific label), they will also have access to the “Edit Settings” cog under “Front Page Setting” – at the course level, you can lock down certain fields on that page (such as

moodle/course:changeshortname, moodle/course:changefullname, and  moodle/course:changecoursesummary, but this does not work for the Front Page sadly. So can you trust your staff not to make any changes to the Front Page setting? That’s a question for you/your admin team. *

Otherwise, give this a try: 

1. Navigate to Site Admin – Users – Permissions – Define Roles: Make sure these permissions are set to N/A for the ‘Authenticated User on Front Page’ role and for the ‘Authenticated User’ role.
   • moodle/course:manageactivities
   • moodle/course:update
   
   
2. Navigate to Front Page Settings (NOT under Site Admin) – Users – Permissions: verify these same two roles above are not listed under this “Roles with Permissions” column or the “Prohibited” column for the above two listed permissions.
   
   
3. Navigate to Site Admin – Users – Permissions – Define Roles: Duplicate the Front Page role for each label you want a group to edit (i.e. if you want a Math Dept label and a Science Dept lable, then duplicate that role twice)
   • Click Define New Role
   • Select “Archetype: Authenticated user on front page” from the drop down & click Continue.
   •Give it a Short and Full name:
     (ie. Front Page Science Label / userfpsci)
     (Front Page Math Label / userfpmath)
   • Check of ‘System’ and ‘Activity Module’ under ‘Context where this role may be assigned’ – this way, you can add users to this role system wide and then assign this role to the label activity permissions on the front page
   • Click the ‘Create this Role’ button
   • DO NOT make any permission changes here.
   
   
4. Navigate to Site Admin – Users – Permissions – Assign System Roles: add the Science teachers to the Science front page role, and the Math teachers to the math front page role, etc…
   
   
5. Go to the Front Page and add one label per department. Throw a title in the labels (ie. Science Label / Math Label).
   
   
6. Click on the ‘Edit’ dropdown for the Science Label and select “Assign Roles” : you should now see Front Page Science Label as a listed role (it may say 0 users with this role for your 2 new roles, but if you click on the role, you’ll see your users are already assigned to it at the system level versus the activity level. You could always set it up so they are assigned at the activity level only, but your 2 new system roles don’t have any additional permissions so you are okay – the next step will take care of this).
   
   
7. While in the same screen as step 6, click on “Permissions” in the Label admin block. If this is your Science label, add the Front Page Sci Label group to the following permission (then repeat this step for each label):
   • moodle/course:manageactivities
   
   
8. Navigate to Front Page Settings (NOT under Site Admin) – Users – Permissions:
   • Add all your new front page roles to this permission
   • moodle/course:update
   • Now, with this, your users will see the “Turn Editing On” option. (Remember, they will now also see the “Edit Front page Setting” cog too).
   
   
9. Now, log in as one user from each group and verify they can now edit the front page but for ONLY the label they were assigned to, no other label and no other activity on the front page.

Hope this works for you as well with your existing set up.

This follows a "revoke" method. Instead of granting the Science teachers to edit the science label, and vice versa for Math, you instead prevent the Science teachers from editing all other labels on the front page, and vice versa for your other roles:

1. Navigate to Site Admin – Users – Permissions – Define Roles: Make sure these permissions are set to N/A for the ‘Authenticated User on Front Page’ role and for the ‘Authenticated User’ role.
   • moodle/course:manageactivities
   • moodle/course:update
2. Navigate to Front Page Settings (NOT under Site Admin) – Users – Permissions: verify these same two roles above are not listed under this “Roles with Permissions” column or the “Prohibited” column for the above two listed permissions.
3. Navigate to Site Admin – Users – Permissions – Define Roles: Duplicate the Front Page role for each label you want a group to edit (i.e. if you want a Math Dept label and a Science Dept lable, then duplicate that role twice)
   • Click Define New Role
   • Select “Archetype: Authenticated user on front page” from the drop down & click Continue.
   •Give it a Short and Full name:
     (ie. Front Page Science Label / userfpsci)
     (Front Page Math Label / userfpmath)
   • Check of ‘System’ and ‘Activity Module’ under ‘Context where this role may be assigned’ – this way, you can add users to this role system wide and then assign this role to the label activity permissions on the front page
   • ADD the following permission: moodle/course:manageactivites
   • Click the ‘Create this Role’ button
4. Navigate to Site Admin – Users – Permissions – Assign System Roles: add the Science teachers to the Science front page role, and the Math teachers to the math front page role, etc…
5. Go to the Front Page and add one label per department. Throw a title in the labels (ie. Science Label / Math Label).
6. Click on the ‘Edit’ dropdown for the Science Label and select “Assign Roles” : you should now see Front Page Science Label as a listed role (it may say 0 users with this role for your 2 new roles, but if you click on the role, you’ll see your users are already assigned to it at the system level versus the activity level. You could always set it up so they are assigned at the activity level only, but your 2 new system roles don’t have any additional permissions so you are okay – the next step will take care of this).
7. While in the same screen as step 6, click on “Permissions” in the Label admin block. If this is your Science label, then remove the following permission for
   ALL other groups you made.  
   • moodle/course:manageactivities
   • Repeat for the Math label (remove the permission for the Science group).
   • If you have any other activities on the Front Page that you don't want these teachers to have editing access to, follow these same steps for the permissions of those individual activities to remove all of the new teacher groups from having the 'manage activity' rights.
   
8. Now, log in as one user from each group and verify they can now edit the front page but for ONLY the label they were assigned to, no other label and no other activity on the front page.

John