Assign user roles to cohort - usage

Assign user roles to cohort - usage

by Derek Lawrie -
Number of replies: 6

I'm having a bit of difficulty getting my head around what the 'Assign user roles to cohort' function is for or how to actually use it.

What I think it does is this:

I have a user-context role, lets call it 'Course Admin', it's based on the Manager archetype, so can basically do just about anything on a course. I've created a user "Other User' and given it the 'Course Admin' role at the system level (is that right? feels wrong).

So I then go to Site Administration > Users > Permissions > Assign user roles to cohort

In there I choose my user 'Other User' in the first box, my role 'Course Admin' in the second and my pre-populated cohort in the third box, I save that and then run the appropriate scheduled task.

I presumed that would mean that all of the members of my cohort now have the same role or roles as 'Other User', but it looks like I'm completely wrong on that front, as my cohort members don't have any of those extra capabilities!

Can anyone enlighten me as to what I'm doing/understanding wrong?

I'm on Moodle 3.3+ if that helps smile

Thanks

Derek

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In reply to Derek Lawrie

Re: Assign user roles to cohort - usage

by Mary Cooch -
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Hello. It might help if you say what you want to do, really. For example. I am not sure why you need a "course admin" role to be in the user context? The user context is usually for, say, a parent role or for teachers who are going to be managing learning plans. So a parent is assigned the role of parent to a selection of children (or a mentor/tutor to a selection of mentees/tutees) or else a teacher is assigned the role of learning plan reviewer to students only in their own class, not students in other classes.


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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Assign user roles to cohort - usage

by Derek Lawrie -
Thanks for the reply Mary but you've lost me there a bit.


What I was thinking I could do with it is to assign a cohort to a role, possibly system or category wide (this is all just conjecture, I'm testing to see if this feature is for us or not, so excuse the example above), as I currently go in to various courses and do a 'cohort sync' to add the users where needed. If I knew I could add them all via a role (probably to a category but could be system wide as I say) it would be quite handy.

I understand that  could be completely missing the point of it to be honest, I'm just curious as to why you would use it.

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In reply to Derek Lawrie

Re: Assign user roles to cohort - usage

by Mary Cooch -
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I can't think of many roles you would wish to assign in bulk in a site or category so perhaps you could explain more? Although not promoted because it has performance issues (apparently) you could try Category enrolments if that serves your purpose? But for most users I'd imagine a course role would suffice?
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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Assign user roles to cohort - usage

by Derek Lawrie -

I can think of quite a few times I would want people to be mass assigned to roles, we have senior managers who like to be able to see all of their courses for example, category enrolments is how we currently do it (yes I know it's not the done thing for performance reasons, but I've been doing it since 1.9.x and have yet to find a better way), I've also seen lots of people over the years asking for a similar thing, adding all of those in a department to a category rather than adding them to each course in said category.

I also extensively use cohort sync, but that obviously involves adding it to each course individually. 

Anyway this is all getting away from the original question as to what 'assign user roles to cohort' is actually for? Someone should be able to explain it without asking me why i want it!


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In reply to Derek Lawrie

Re: Assign user roles to cohort - usage

by Mary Cooch -
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Here is an example of assigning user roles to a cohort: Learning plan viewer (sections 1 and 3)

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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Assign user roles to cohort - usage

by Derek Lawrie -

Ah that makes sense now! 

Sorry, it's not what I thought it was, not usable how I thought, but I can see how I could possibly use it.

Thanks for the help and pointing me in the right direction.

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