Parent role

The role of Parent may be used to provide parents/mentors/tutors with permission to view certain information, such as activity reports, grades, blog entries and forum posts, about their children/mentees/tutees.

Note: In this page, the terms "Permissions" and "Capabilities" are used as interchangeable terms. Please bear in mind that they are in fact a pair. A capability is an editable behaviour and a permission is the value given that capability.

Using a Custom Role

In the page Create Custom Roles, a generic Role was created and given the name of Parent. In this part, the Role is going to be linked to a Student Role, which is why the role was called "Parent". (By now there should be two additional Users in the User Accounts, say, "Perant Test" and "Stedunt Test".) Return to the Role list and see if the Role has been properly created, then click on it to start reviewing capabilities.

Returning to the Parent Role

TIP: Take a note of all changes made and keep a record. This role may need to be re-created from time to time.

Next the capabilities of this Role need to be determined. What is different in this Role that required the Role be created in the first place? As the Role has already had a Context selected for it, User, it is that area of the Capabilities that need existing permissions altered. Turn editing on and scroll down to the section named "User", look for the fields listed below and reset the values on these capabilities:

Viewing the structure of the Parent Role and turning editing on

Change moodle/user:viewdetails to allow
Change any/all of the following capabilities to allow
- moodle/user:readuserblogs - to read the child's blog entries
- moodle/user:readuserposts - to read the child's forum posts
- moodle/user:viewuseractivitiesreport - to view the child's activity reports and grades
- moodle/user:editprofile - to edit the child's profile

Role assignment

Access the child's profile page and click on the Roles tab i.e. assign the role in the user context , 'Profile settings for [username]' > 'Roles' >'Assign roles relative to this user'
Choose the role to assign i.e. Parent
Select the parent in the potential users list, and use the left-facing arrow button to add it to the existing users list

The same parent may be assigned to several children.

Adding multiple role assignments at once

(if you are interested in assigning several parent roles en masse read the discussion at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=70539#p345127)

Mentees block

The Mentees block provides a parent with quick access to their child's profile page via a link on the site front page.

On the site front page click "Turn editing on"
Choose Mentees from the Add a block drop-down menu
If required, give the Mentees block a title by following the block configuration/edit link

Viewing activity reports

If the capability moodle/user:viewuseractivitiesreport is set to allow then a parent/mentee may view their student's activity reports and grades via the student's Profile.

On the main Profile page, there will be a list of courses. Clicking on a course title will select that course. Then, under the Activities tab, the various report and grades sub-tabs will display information relevant to the selected course. You can easily change which course you are reviewing by selecting another one on the main Profile tab.

One small hack that can make the course list a bit more readable, especially for long course lists, is to change the format to a vertical list:

Edit the moodle/user/view.php file and look for these lines (around line 349 in my 1.9.9 installation):

. format_string($mycourse->fullname) . "</a>, "; } else { $courselisting .= format_string($mycourse->fullname) . ", ";

and change that to :

. format_string($mycourse->fullname) . "</a> "; } else { $courselisting .= format_string($mycourse->fullname) . " ";;

Then save

Documentation