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.

PLEASE NOTE: A bug with the parent role preventing parents seeing individual grades was fixed in Moodle 2.7.2.

Creating a new role

1. As an administrator, go to Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles and click the "Add a new role" button.
2. For archtype role choose "No role."
3. Give the role a short name (such as "Parent", but it can be anything appropriate, such as tutor/mentor)
4. Give the role a custom full name (such as "Parent", but it can be anything appropriate, such as tutor/mentor)
5. Under Context types where this role may be assigned check the user context.
6. Under the heading of Course
7. Change moodle/user:viewdetails to allow - to access the student's profile
8. Under the heading of Users
9. Change moodle/user:viewalldetails to allow - to view all aspects of the student's profile
10. Change any/all of the following capabilities to allow
    • moodle/user:readuserblogs - to read the student's blog entries
    • moodle/user:readuserposts - to read the student's forum posts
    • moodle/user:viewuseractivitiesreport - to view the student's activity reports and grades
    • moodle/user:editprofile - to edit the student's profile
11. Click the "Create this role" button.

Setting up the parent role

Assigning capabilities to the parent role

Saving changes to the parent role

Some permissions may already be set to "Allow", or the permissions granted here may not be the ones required for that Role. This set of Permissions mean that this Role allows anyone assigned to a Parent Role, then linked to the Student Role, to edit the profile or read the blogs of that Student - not everyone's profile or blogs.

Assigning the parent to the student

• Access the child's profile page, via Site administration ► Users ► Accounts ► Browse list of users
• Go to '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 Add button to add it to the existing users list.

"Assign roles relative to this user"

Assigning the parent to the student

At this point you can return to the "Assign roles in user:" page and you should see that the parent name is now in the "Users with Role" column.

NOTE:The same parent may be assigned to several students, siblings or otherwise.

Adding multiple parents/mentors at once

If you are interested in assigning several parent roles en masse there is a contributed plugin (use at your own risk) here CONTRIB-3938 which allows you to configure automatic role assignment between users from a database (ex: mentor/mentee or parent/child). You can also read the discussion at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=70539#p345127)

Adding the Mentees Block

This block needs to be added so parents can see links to their child's profile.

• On the Front Page, turn editing on.
• Go to the Add Blocks block and select the Mentees block and when it appears, click on the Configuration icon.
• Edit the configuration settings to suit the needs of the site. When complete, save the changes and return to the Front Page.

Accessing the Add Blocks

Setting the configuration values

How a parent sees their child's activities

• Once the mentees block has been added, a parent/mentor sees the link to any children/mentees they are responsible for.
• They click on a name and will be taken to the profile page of that user.
• They then click -next to "Course profiles" - the name of a course the user is enrolled in.
• Grades may then be viewed by clicking in the user's profile > Site Administration>Activity reports>Grades
• Forum posts or similar may also be viewed from the user's profile in Navigation>(Name)>Forum posts (for example)

Click the name of a course in the profile

Only then choose an item in the Navigation or Administration block

The course grades are now visible

• To view activity in another course, the parent needs to click back to the user's main profile and then select another course link.

See also

• The Parent role in Moodle 2.0 video
• Create a custom role

Using Moodle forum discussions:

• Create a Parent of a student role
• Parent Role Report: Who belongs to whom?

• Improving navigation:

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 302-304 in my 2.3.2 installation):

. $cfullname . "</a>, ";

               } else {
                   $courselisting .= $cfullname . ", ";

• and change that to :

. $cfullname . "</a>,
";

               } else {
                   $courselisting .= $cfullname . "
";;

• Then save

This will affect the profile view in a course.

• Edit the moodle/user/profile.php file and look for these lines (around line 3332 in my 2.3.2 installation):

$courselisting .= "<a href=\"{$CFG->wwwroot}/user/view.php?id={$user->id}&course={$mycourse->id}\" $class >" . format_string($mycourse->fullname) . "</a>, ";

• and change that to :

$courselisting .= "<a href=\"{$CFG->wwwroot}/user/view.php?id={$user->id}&course={$mycourse->id}\" $class >" . format_string($mycourse->fullname) . "</a>,
";

• Then save

This will affect the profile view from the main page.