Roles and permissions

Yes, a student can be given permission to manage files within a course. Do it like this:

• as admin, create a new role CanAdd, giving it moodle/course:managefiles permission.
  
• as teacher, assign the CanAdd role to selected students

Students with the CanAdd role will see a yellow Files icon in their Administration block. Others will not. Such students will have full permission to do anything in the course files area (including deleting everything ).

I call a role like CanAdd a "mixin" because it can be combined (or "mixed in") with other roles, like Student, thereby adding a small set of related capabilities (often, only one capability, as in this example).

Note that the Student role is not changed because to do so would affect all Students.