Creator's Role in New Course

Creator's Role in New Course

by Derek Theriot -
Number of replies: 5

I have a role that is allowed to create/edit courses and upload content to the courses in a particular category.  Everything seems to be working fine, with one exception.  I was looking at the user policy setting that let's you define the role a user is assigned in a course they create.  This sentence is what is confusing me:  This role is not assigned if creator already has needed capabilities in parent context.

In our setup, we have a role named Course Director.  This is granted at the category level.  These users are allowed to create and manage courses in that category.  However, there are some limitations.  We do not allow them to see grades and a few other things.  This is the role we have as the setting in user policy.  As I am reading the description from the user policy page, it seems like this role should not be automatically assigned at the course level since the user already has these permissions at the category level.  It doesn't seem to be working since the user that created the course is still getting the role assigned at the course level.

I understand that we can allow the course director to unenroll themselves from the course, but we can't always be sure that they are going to do that.  We do not want these users listed as a participant of the course and we do not want them receiving emails from forum posts.  Our site is way to big to manually go in and unenroll them from the course.

Am I not understanding the setting in user policy that says the role will not be assigned if the user already has the capabilities in the parent context?  I assume the parent context of the course is the category.

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In reply to Derek Theriot

Re: Creator's Role in New Course

by John Isner -
The "creator's role in new courses" (by default Teacher) is the role assigned to the course creator (small "c" meaning the user, not the role) in a newly created course. If you use the predefined roles as they come out of the box, you would assign a user the role of Course creator in a category context. The user will then have permission to create courses in that category, and can do virtually nothing else. When the user creates a course, he/she is assigned a second role of Teacher (or whatever you specified in the user policy) WITHIN the course, enabling them to do teacher-like things. A course creator often assigns the role of Teacher to another user, then unassign him/her self and goes back to creating courses.

I agree that the wording of the note accompanying the User policy needs clarification as to what constitutes the "needed capabilities" in the parent context. My guess (without looking at the code) is that Moodle checks whether the creator (the user who created the course) already has moodle/legacy:teacher = Allow (e.g., from having been assigned Teacher in a higher context). If I'm right about that, the message means that that the Teacher role won't be assigned again in the course, because the creator already has Teacher-like capabilities. Ugh. I'll research this and post what I find.

Meanwhile, it would be useful to know (1) what are your requirements for course directors (small "c" meaning the user -- I'm interested in hearing about the job description, not what you did in Moodle and only then (2) how your Course Director role is defined.

You might also find this discussion helpful in shedding some light on Course creators.

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In reply to John Isner

Re: Creator's Role in New Course

by John Isner -
FYI, I was wrong in my interpretation of the note under "Creator's role in new courses."

Moodle checks to see if the creator (small "c", the user, not the role) has permission to view the course (moodle/course:view) and the ability to assign roles (moodle/role:assign). If the user lacks either, Moodle assigns the role specified in User policies (by default Teacher).

Note that the predefined Course creator role does not have either of these permissions.
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In reply to John Isner

Re: Creator's Role in New Course

by Derek Theriot -

To be completely honest, our teachers are lazy.  They do not have the time to create the courses and upload the content.  We have created a role that will allow their support personnel to create the course and upload the content for them.  The role is not allowed to see grades, take tests, ...  They are also not allowed to assign roles.  We have a separate feed that uses the flat file enrollment plugin to enroll students and teachers in the course.  All other role assignment is performed by our information security group.

We do not want the course creator (user, not role) to be shown as a participant in the course or receive emails from forum posts.  It sounds like the only way to do this is to allow that role the capability of assigning roles in a course.  Since this is something that we do not want to do, is there a way to tell moodle to not subscribe certain users to the forums?  It looks like either you have to let everyone choose or force all to subscribe.

As far as these users not showing up as a participant, I suppose we could "educate" our teachers to use the drop down box on the participants screen to only show students.  However, I still don't like the fact that they are assigned that role at the course level.  We have several people in this role in each category and the only one that will be assigned the role will be the one who actually creates the course.  It just seems a little messy.  We also do not want to have our security group have to go into each course and remove this role from the user.  We will end up having hundreds of courses and this would be very burdensome.

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In reply to Derek Theriot

Re: Creator's Role in New Course

by John Isner -
I am confused. Can you just start over and just list the requirements? Pretend you're writing the description for a job you're hiring someone for. Just list their responsibilities. Cut out all extraneous detail and don't mention roles. From that, we can come up with a list of permissions they need and the contexts where they need them, and from that we can come up with a reasonable allocation of those permissions to roles.


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In reply to John Isner

Re: Creator's Role in New Course

by Derek Theriot -

This will be a support group for the instructors.  They will be allowed to create courses and upload content for the instructors.  They should not be able to see student grades or participate in any of the discussions, activities, take tests, ...

We have the permissions already set up to allow this.  The problem is when they create the course, they are listed as a participant of that course.  They are automatically subscribed to forums and will receive the emails from those forums.

I think what we are going to do is grant that role the permissions to unassign themselves from that role in the course.  It's not exactly how we expected it to behave, but it will work.

Thanks.

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