courseware manager/graduate assistant role

courseware manager/graduate assistant role

by Garret Gengler -
Number of replies: 3

Greetings... We're working feverishly on moving from our 1.5 pilot to a full release of 1.7 in Spring 2006.  (Yah, a few weeks away!)

We're having trouble defining a role for graduate assistants in our office who provide support to our faculty.   Our graduate assistants (GAs) work with any instructor who want to use moodle to support their teaching... Sometimes it's just a consultation thing, but for less tech-saavy instructors, we may need to jump in and do the work for them: creating a syllabus, creating course resources, etc.

The graduate students are students themselves... so we have a rule that they don't support their own class, only other classes.

We've created a site-context role called "GA" which basically gets them instructor capabilities for any class in the system, with a few exceptions (grading, for example).

We also have the default student role (i.e., the GAs are enrolled in their own classes, with the student role set).

Here's the question, in short... how do I make the student role override the site-wide GA role?   I want the more powerful GA role to only apply to classes where a GA does not have the more restrictive student role.

THanks for your help,
-Garret Gengler
University of Illinois
School of Library and Information Science

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In reply to Garret Gengler

Re: courseware manager/graduate assistant role

by Garret Gengler -

Eureka, we might have a solution...

We changed the default student role so instead of inheriting certain capabilities, it explicitly prevents them... so now, if a user has student role in a given course, and also has GA role site-wide, the more restrictive student role takes precedence.

Seems odd to have to modify the existing student role to do this... but after a week of fiddling, it's the only way we could get it to work.

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In reply to Garret Gengler

Re: courseware manager/graduate assistant role

by Yu Zhang -
Hi Garret,

This is correct. Inherit has a value of 0, and prevent has a value of -1. When you set it to inherit, the roles system will look up for higher context values. Eventually when it reaches the system context it will find your GA role, and grant permission. I do not really understand what you are trying to do, but you could consider the override function in roles. If you want your GA role users not able to do some things you can override some capabilities for the GA role in certain courses.

Cheers,

Yu
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In reply to Garret Gengler

Re: courseware manager/graduate assistant role

by Jocelyn Graf -

I had a similar problem this past semester. I hired an assistant from one of my courses. She remained in the course as a student, but needed to help me input grades for her own class.

What we discovered was that she could be assigned a teacher role and still add grades to her name, along with everyone else. (In fact, for some reason, even my name shows up in the gradebook and it's possible to assign grades to me.)

Then, at the end of the semester, we needed to have her included as a student in order to properly calculate the weighted and curved grades for the class. We removed her from the teacher list, added her back to the student list, and fortunately, her grades hadn't disappeared.

I'm just posting this so that if anyone else has the same trouble, you don't have to wonder whether you will lose the grades you entered when you make the role switch.

Ideally, there would be some kind of customizable third/dual role that allows for my situation as well as the graduate assistant situation described above. Another situation is when I want to let my colleagues "lurk" in my courses to learn about how Moodle works. I give them teacher status so they can see the gradebook, etc. When I give them a teacher role, they show up under the list of teachers visible to students.

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