Roles and permissions
Template:Moodle 1.7
The new roles and capabilities system in Moodle provides you with a huge amount of flexibility to manage how students and other people interact. In older versions of Moode (prior to 1.7), there were only six roles possible: guest, student, non-editing teacher, editing teacher, course creator, and administrator. Whilst the new system supports these roles out of the box, it also allows you to create and customize roles, and to change what a given role can do in each activity. For example, you can now create permissions in individual forums, which allows you to let students act as moderators in one forum, while you retain the moderator role in all of the other forums in your course.
Examples of roles
Why would a site want different roles? Consider the following:
Site Designers, Educational Authority Adviser, Educational Inspector, Second Marker / Moderator, Peer observer of teaching, External Examiner, Parent, Manager, Weekly Seminar Leader, Mentor/Mentee, Community-Designed Rating Criteria, Visitor, Guest Speaker, Former Student, Alumnus, Librarian, Teacher, Community Education Tutors/Trainers, Secretary/Student Worker, Teaching Assistant, Student - FERPA rights, Help Desk
Definitions
- A role is an identifier of the user's status in some context, for example teacher, student and forum moderator.
- A capability is a description of a particular Moodle feature, for example moodle/blog:create. Capabilities are associated with roles.
- A permission is a value that is assigned for a capability for a particular role, for example allow or prevent.
- A context is a "space" in Moodle, such as courses, activity modules or blocks. Roles will only work if the role assignment is made at the correct context level. For example, a teacher role should be assigned at course context level, a forum moderator for a particular forum should be assigned at activity level, an administrator should be assigned at system level and so on.
Contexts
The list of contexts in hierarchical order is as follows:
- System context - accessible via the administrator's block (no parent)
- Site context - accessible via the administrator's block front page section (parent = system) 1.8+ only
- Course category context - accessible via the course category page (parent = site)
- Course context - accessible via the course administration block (old admin block) (parent = course category or site)
- Module context - accessible whilst updating the module (parent = course)
- Block context - accessible when editing mode is on (parent = site or course)
- User context - accessible via the Roles tab in the user profile (parent = site)
Inheritance will kick in if a role is assigned at a higher level. For example assigning a teacher to a course category will make this user the teacher for ALL courses within the category.
Capabilities
Capabilities are aggregated and controlled via roles. Stated another way, a role consists of a list of capabilities for different possible actions within Moodle (e.g. delete discussions or add activities). With 1.7 it's now possible to have sophisticated yet flexible levels of control over participants and what they can or can't do.
Upgrading to 1.7
The upgrade to 1.7 is as smooth as we could make it. The existing roles (admin, teacher, student etc.) and the existing capabilities will be automatically retained. This is done by creating default roles at site/course levels, and assigning the current users to these roles accordingly. The default roles will have default capabilities associated with them, mirroring what we have in 1.6. With no modifications, Moodle will operate almost exactly the same before and after the upgrade.
Roles in 1.8
Template:Moodle 1.8 In addition to many Roles fixes and refinements, Moodle 1.8 has separated the SYSTEM context from the SITE context (which makes it more like 1.6 used to work). The SITE context is the "front page course" and it's activities. This should make it easier for admins to set up permissions.
