Understanding Roles and Permissions in Moodle's Learning Management System (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Two words in the learning management system that are commonly confused are roles and permissions. And it's pretty straightforward. A role is a collection of permissions. And permissions are the individual abilities of the user in the role to do something. So if you come to site administration users and you come down here to define roles, what you'll see is the standard roles and any custom roles that you have in your Moodle learning management system. So these, this is the name of the role. You should always have a description about what they can do. This is the short name which is used if you're assigning them to a CSV, via CSV file. And then you can edit the permissions for each role. So for example, if I click on the gear icon here for the student role, what I'm going to see is a list of student permissions. And so if, as I scroll down here, these are all individual permissions that allow that student to do or not do certain things. So for example, a student is not allowed to add a new custom box block to the dashboard because that permission is not checked. On the other hand, if I come down, I may be able to see something that a student can do right here. They are allowed to edit and manage external blogs, search for blog entries, or view blog entries. So individual permissions can be added or subtracted from a role. Now, what I recommend is this, and I'm going to go slightly more in depth than I had planned on it. But these are the default roles created by this system. I never recommend that they be edited, never, never, never. The reason is that these are specifically designed to provide certain capabilities and limitations to the student role. If you decide at some point later on that you want to modify this role, then what I would recommend is that you create a custom role based on this archetype. So what you're doing is you are creating essentially a second student role. You're giving it a different name, and then you are adding or subtracting the permissions that you want. You always leave these the same so that that way you can always revert if you decide that you don't like what that custom role was capable of doing. So I would never modify these roles. If you do want to create a separate role, use this as an archetype. But role is a collection of permissions. Permissions are the individual things that make up the role. So those two words are going to be really important when you're talking with somebody, especially a learning management system administrator, about what you need from them in your site.