March 13, 2006

Type of user in Moodle

Currently Moodle has only three types of user:

  1. Administrator. Has all-powerful access to everything
  2. Teacher. Can only do things within their own course
  3. Student. No ability to upload material independent of an Activity. So group work is impossible.

There is a ‘teaching assistant’ but this is not a real user type.

This brings up the more general issue of teacher access to each other’s courses. What Moodle needs is a finer grained ‘permissions’ model. For example:

  • Secretaries need permission to upload files but nothing else.
  • Other teachers could be allowed read access without having to log in as guest.
  • Teaching Assistants need fine grained permission to create and grade certain assignments (eg discussion Forums).
  • And perhaps the option for a ‘Reference Shelf’ where Reference Librarians could deposit useful resources and provide a focus for bibliographic assistance.
Posted by markp at March 13, 2006 11:20 AM