In a break from Android programming posts this entry will look at the issue of staff undertaking Moodle courses in the College.

First an outline of the issue: All of our staff are automatically assigned a site wide role ‘visiting lecturer’. This role is based on the Editing Teacher role and allows any lecturer to access any course on our Moodle system which we felt was easier than allocating lecturer roles per course. If cover is required at short notice there is no reason for lecturers to be burdened requesting access to a Moodle course.

The other problem with Moodle’s built in Editing Teacher role is that every unit for which you have the role is listed on your profile. I know I can override this but it’s easier just to keep a separate role.

Simply assigning the lecturer the role of ‘student’ within a course is not sufficient. The site wide permissions imparted by ‘visiting lecturer’ mean that the student role is effectively ignored.

We need some way to prevent the staff from accessing assignment material or jumping ahead in a Moodle course in which they are supposed to be a student (Staff development, first aid etc.).

I have created a role in Moodle called LecPreventer. I carefully set all of the ‘deny’ entries in the LecPreventer role to match the basic capabilities of a student role.

Now, deny entries have a higher priority than inherited or allow settings so having this role within a course does leave the lecturer with student like permissions.

ASP.NET interface

I have written an ASP.NET page on the staff intranet to allow a chosen group of users to allocate the new role to members of staff in a course context:

Logged in to Moodle as testlecturer in the course sb103 the lecturer is seeing the course as a student: