In this article by Alex Büchner, we will introduce roles—a complex but powerful subject. Roles define what users can or cannot see and perform in your Moodle system. The article later explains assignment of roles, modifying them, over riding them, creating custom roles with example and finally testing those new roles to perform a reality check. We also explain how to resolve permission conflict in Moodle's Roles.

In the first part you will:

• Understand how roles work, and how they fit into different contexts.
• Assign roles to different users in different contexts.

In the next part you will:

• Modify roles and create new ones, including a role for parents or mentors.
• Manage a range of administrative role-related settings.

Lets get started.

Moodle's PreDefined Roles

Moodle comes with a number of predefined roles. These standard roles are suitable for some educational setups, but most institutions require modifications to the roles' system in order to tailor Moodle to their specific needs.

Each role has permissions for a number of actions that can be carried out in Moodle. For example, an administrator and a course creator are able to create new courses, whereas all other roles are denied this right. Likewise, a teacher is allowed to moderate forums, whereas students are only allowed to contribute to them.

The description of each standard role and the short names (that are used internally and in operations such as user batch upload) given by Moodle are listed in the table that follows:

Before we can actually do anything with roles, we need to understand the concept of contexts, which is dealt with next.

Contexts

Contexts are the areas in Moodle where roles can be assigned to users. A role can be assigned within different contexts. A user has a role in any given context, where a context can be a course, an activity module, a user, a block, or Moodle itself. Moodle comes with the following seven contexts that you will come across a lot in this article.