Question permissions

Roles and capabilities are combined with Question categories to give a user permission to create, edit and view questions in the Question bank. For example, a combination might allow a student being able to edit questions in a specific quiz activity or all science teachers being able to use the question categories created for their department and not view other departments categories. In short, question categories are contexts (see Question contexts) and work with roles to determine a user's permissions in managing individual questions.

Also, Question permissions allow a user to grant other users permissions. For example, a teacher in a course may decide to share their questions located in a specific course question category with other teachers who do not have permission to enter their course. This is all done with permissions that are given to a role in a specific context.

Brief review of permission concepts

The 2.0 Moodle Question bank simplifies the task of organization of questions but the terminology can be confusing. In general, a set of questions is created in what is called a question category. A question category is like a folder in a computer file system or in file cabinet. Like a file folder, a question category might contain other question categories or just a set of questions. Permissions are assigned to question categories. The nesting (placing of a question category within another question category) can create a hierarchy of permissions when it comes to dealing with individual questions located in a question category.

By default a course teacher does not have permission to do anything with questions placed in a category outside the course in which they are assigned a teacher role. By default, students can not even see the Question bank or edit any question. The default permissions can be changed to meet specific goals of a site, a course or even a specific quiz activity.

Technical notes for administrators

For users who have privileges to alter the permissions for a role, here are some permissions that affect Question bank and its management and use:

• moodle/question:config
• moodle/question:managecategory
• moodle/question:add - determines whether a user has permission to import questions

• moodle/question:editall
• moodle/question:editmine
• moodle/question:moveall
• moodle/question:movemine
• moodle/question:useall
• moodle/question:usemine
• moodle/question:viewall
• moodle/question:viewmine
• Certain capabilities contain the words all or mine:
  • all means all questions, and if you have the all capability, mine is not tested.
  • mine means that you have the capability for your questions but not for questions created by others

See also

• How to let teachers share questions between courses
• Question permissions explained with diagrams
• Question creator role

Using Moodle forum discussions:

• capability for editing new questions
• examining present capabilities for questions