I just upgraded to Moodle 1.7 and I am hoping to be able to allow varying access to modules in a single course depending on the role assigned to a student. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the settings and almost don't know where to start.
I will make it simple. Imagine I have a role "Students A" and a role "Students B." I have 3 forums in my course, "Forum 1", "Forum 2" and "Forum 3." I want students who have the role "Student A" to have access to everything in the course (ie all forums). I want students in role Students B to have access only to forum 1 and for them to not even see the other forums. I see how I can create different "roles" through the admin panel, and I'm thinking I would just need to create another role identical to the current student role, except for its name. However, how do I then vary the things those two roles would see as outlined above?
You only need one new role, since "Students A" are just just normal Students, who can see and participate in all forums. Let's call the new role "Students B"
Define a new role Students B (Users -> Permissions -> Define Roles -> Add a new role button). In the role, leave all permissions Not set except for View discussions; set it to Prevent.
Edit Forums 2 and 3 and assign the Students B role to the student(s) that you want to prevent from participating (Forum -> Update this forum -> Assign roles tab). Students you assign to this role will SEE the forum icon on the main course page, but if they click it they will get a "Sorry" message.
Am I missing something? Is there a particular reason you chose to upgrade to 1.7 rather than 1.9? I would recommend 1.9 if you're going to be doing much with roles.
Define a new role Students B (Users -> Permissions -> Define Roles -> Add a new role button). In the role, leave all permissions Not set except for View discussions; set it to Prevent.
Edit Forums 2 and 3 and assign the Students B role to the student(s) that you want to prevent from participating (Forum -> Update this forum -> Assign roles tab). Students you assign to this role will SEE the forum icon on the main course page, but if they click it they will get a "Sorry" message.
Am I missing something? Is there a particular reason you chose to upgrade to 1.7 rather than 1.9? I would recommend 1.9 if you're going to be doing much with roles.
I haven't tackled conversion to UTF-8. It was buggy in 1.6. That's why I can't move any further yet, but I'm hoping to get it working in 1.7 and then upgrade after. My site already had lots of UTF-8 before the UTF-8 "support" was added so everything will be corrupted otherwise. I would rather move version by version too as I have non-standard modules etc. that I don't want to subject to too great a leap. It's easier to tweak things bit-by-bit than have something break completely.
The Unicode conversions shouldn't cause problems if the character sets in your old language packs are defined correctly. If you were using Unicode before then those texts in that language will be skipped.
If you go to 1.9 which I recommend, then it's probably easier to just use groupings as it's designed for this.
So you just have students in groups, then you put your groups into groupings (you may have to enable groupings in admin as it's off by default).
Then when you edit each activity you just say which grouping can see it.
So you just have students in groups, then you put your groups into groupings (you may have to enable groupings in admin as it's off by default).
Then when you edit each activity you just say which grouping can see it.