A question I hear regularly in my travel from both teachers and Moodle admins alike is “How can I give my student’s parents access to moodle?”. Surprisingly the answer is relatively simple if not a prolonged process.
Before Moodle 1.7 we traditionally had only 6 pre-defined roles. These included:
- Administrator
- Course Creator
- Teacher
- Non-editing Teacher
- Student
- Guest
Of course many situations arose where Admins wanted to create more roles that met their specific requirements. When Moodle 1.7 was released one of the many additions it brought along with it was a new Roles architecture funded mainly by the Open University that finally gave admins the ability to create their own roles with set permissions on demand. And there was much rejoicing (YAY!).
Now I could write a 10 page article on roles, which to put your mind at ease I will not do now. But needless to say the ability to create on demand roles to allow specific functionality for users is a godsend. I have a role to allow a user just the ability to post news on the frontpage, another role for College Directors and so forth. Todays post though will look at creating a Parent Role.
What is a Parent Role?
Here is the situation many of us are faced with. We have parents who want to see their child’s progress inside the LMS. How can this be achieved while maintaining privacy. Here was my list of “Must Haves” and “Must Not Haves.
Must Have:
- Ability to see their child’s marks
- Track their child’s access of materials
- Be able to view their child’s activity
- View content created by their child (forum and blog posts/uploaded assignments)
Must Not Have
- the ability to see other children’s details
- access to course materials. I don’t want my teachers judged by what they have online
- The ability to change or edit their child’s work
Great news is we can create a custom role that will allow us to facilitate this!
Before I go on I also need to talk about where we can apply roles. Most teachers and admins know that roles can be allocated at a course/category/site level. (i.e. admins are site level roles, course creators may be category level roles and teachers are course level roles). But what many admins don’t know is that we can also apply roles at activity and at the user level as well. For parent roles to function we actually add a parent role to a student. This means that parents will only see details for the student/students to which they are attached.
How do we set this up? Well the following is blatantly copied and pasted from the MoodleDocs. If you are not yet already a follower of this brilliant user created wiki for Moodle documentation then where have you been? 
Setting up the Role
Creating new roles and allocating permissions is something that only Moodle admins can do. If you only have teacher access I am afraid at this point I have to tell you to not pass Go or collect $200. If you are an admin read on. All of this is also covered in the Moodle tutorial at the bottom of this post.
- From your homepage’s “Site Administration” menu click on Users > Permissions > Define roles
- Click the button “Add a new role”
- Give the role a name e.g. Parent, short name and description
For the following steps, as the permission list is huge, I find using the browsers built in “find” function invaluable.
- Change any/all of the following capabilities to allow
- moodle/user:viewdetails -- to view the childs profile
- moodle/user:readuserblogs -- to read the child’s blog entries
- moodle/user:readuserposts -- to read the child’s forum posts
- moodle/user:viewuseractivitiesreport -- to view the child’s activity reports and grades
- moodle/user:editprofile -- to edit the child’s profile
- Click the button “Add a new role”. You now have what is needed for a basic Parent role to function
Assigning the new Role to the Student
Before we go any further I must point out the obvious. The parent needs to have their own account in your Moodle. This means they have their own name and password. The process/policy discussion round this is huge and not one for this post. But lets assume you have it created ok?
- Either from the course’s participant list or through the search users function in the admin screens access the child’s profile page and click on the Roles tab. This tab allows us to add a new role permission to this student only
- Choose the role to assign. In this case we will use the “Parent” role we created above
- Select the parent in the potential users list (remember you can use the search underneath to save time), and use the left-facing arrow button to add it to the existing users list.
- Your done! No repeat as necessary if that parent has more than one child at your institution.
The Mentees Block
The next question is, now that we have the roles assigned, how does the parent get to their childs profile? The good news is that Moodle has thought of this and has included the “Mentees Block”.
The Mentees block, from Moodle 1.8 onwards, may be added to the site front page or to the My Moodle page. It provides a mentor/parent with quick access to their mentee(s)/child(s) profile page.
To add this block to the site front page:
- On the site front page click “Turn editing on”
- Choose Mentees from the Add a block drop-down menu
- If required, give the Mentees block a different title (e.g. Parent portal) by clicking the edit icon in the blocks header.
To add this block to the My Moodle page:
- Access My Moodle configuration via Administration > Appearance > Sticky blocks
- Choose Mentees from the Add a block drop-down menu
- If required, give the Mentees block a different title (e.g. Parent portal) by clicking the edit icon in the blocks header.
The Video Walkthrough
Finishing Up
Note that as mentioned above this role can be used for not just parents but also is well suited to tutor’s, mentors and other supervisory style roles. This is just an introduction to one of the many roles that you can build in Moodle. If you have any oter roles you would like to see covered please detail them in the comments and Ill see what I can do.
The Moodleman does it again. Well explained, well worth it and very topical at our school.
A bit of this should be written down in a book somewhere, don’t you think
Top post, thanks
Tomaz
Excellent step by step instructions – just one tiny problem – as you say – the pointing out the obvious: every parent needs their own login! I’d love parents to be on our Moodle but at the moment as you rightly say the discussion is huge – is it both parents? What if they’re separated/remarried? Can it be grandparents/socialworker? Should each child have a limited number of allocated “parents” And so on…
On the other hand, I do take on board your point that this role could also be well suited to “tutors, mentors and other supervisory roles” where the borderlines might be clearer but the role just as useful.
Nice article Julian. One point I would differ on is the parent access to course material. In the interests of transparency and openness, I think parents should be able to see what sort of material is being created and presented in the course. You will always need to deal with the over -intrusive parent, but that has been the case for a long time. That is a matter for parent education.
In response to Peter: The policies around parental access are nearly as terrifying as the implementation process iteself. At a previous school I had a teacher revolt when it was suggested that prents could see what they were doing online. Especially in blended learning environments teachers dont want to feel judged on their effectiveness as a teacher based by what they put inside their moodle course. On the other hand, it can be a great way for institutions to make staff put more online due to this same fear.
This in itself becomes a policy discussion within College executives and will be determined by the elearning goals those institutions wish to pursue. In the perfect world teachers would be proud to show off to parents what is happening online and how they are using innovative technologies in engaging ways with their children, but while some teachers are there now, there is still some way to go for the rest to catch up.
Moodledude, the LMS purports to open up learning for students so they can collaborate and draw on the input of other teachers and their peers. Bridging learning from the classroom to home is a crucial part of enhancing outcomes for students as well. I think parents should be able to browse the suite of resources available in a course and encourage faculties or year groups to be accountable for the quality of their resources. Folks tend to dress things up nicely when they know people are watching… Good initiative though.
Thank you! I was hesitant to give a parent their student’s login and password for fear that they would pose as the student. This would allow them access to see their student’s progress and information without seeing everything else. I’m adding that role right now!
Also, parent accounts could be added as needed. There are currently over 28,300 users on our Moodle site, but not all parents need or want access.
So let’s say you want parents to access the course web pages for the courses their children are enrolled in. Is it possible to grant them access without requiring enrollment? It’s a hassle when parents are functionally equivalent to students in classes, showing up in assignment grading lists and so on. I’d like them to have the equivalent of guest access, but for courses in which guest access is turned off. Your thoughts?
Hi Julian,
I was just discussing this possibility with a school in the Wimmera today. Now I have step by step instructions! Thanks for such an informative post.
Cheers
Darrel
@Richard
Well kind of. You would have to manually assign course permissions to do so which would be an absolute pain in the proverbial, but it would be possible.
I keep coming back to the management of this. While creating the roles themselves is easy, the application and the process behind it can be tedious at best. Make sure you think through the who, how, why and when of access.
– Who should be allowed access
– how will that access be granted (account creation and permissions)
– Why does this user need to access. (Don’t want to give to much access)
– When does the user need to have this access granted. (How long to create the accounts and when should it be deactivated)
There are no simple answers to these questions, but they need to be thoroughly discussed before you consider implementation.
Great idea that has been mooted for a long time. Could these permissions be managed through bulk actions if we changed to database managed enrolments.
Currently, most schools I know have mixture of LDAP enrolment and upload and self enrolment. I don’t know anyone with database enrolment.
IF we move to database enrolment (which I feel we should as soon as i can figure it out, could we then automatically manage assignment of parent/ mentor permissions at the same time ???
i.e. are permissions manageable through the database…
PS: great site ! Only just discovered it !
Great idea that has been mooted for a long time. Could these permissions be managed through bulk actions if we changed to database managed enrolments.
Currently, most schools I know have mixture of LDAP enrolment and upload and self enrolment. I don’t know anyone with database enrolment.
IF we move to database enrolment (which I feel we should as soon as i can figure it out, could we then automatically manage assignment of parent/ mentor permissions at the same time ???
i.e. are permissions manageable through the database…
PS: great site ! Only just discovered it !
PPS if you make a mistake with your CAPTCHA, you lose your comment !!!
We’re rolling out Moodle K-12 in our district, but one teacher at a time. The thing I see with this idea is that students will GIVE their names and passwords to their parents… maybe not in Junior/Senior High, but certainly below that. So all a parent has to do is log in AS their student.
We just stress to our teachers that, even though it is somewhat password protected, it is still web based and should be treated as web publishing.
This is a great post, well planned out and very informative.
I’m curious though, this must be a huge burden on the administrator of a Moodle site. Granted, it’s a great resource, but I imagine it would take hours to even hook up 100 students or so to the parents on the site.
Any ideas if there is a bulk solution, even only in testing at Moodle.org or elsewhere? If not…I guess I’ll hit the drawing board!
There is no bulk method that I am aware of. (
Yay, you are the first to receive a threaded response in comments
A well considered post! This does seem like a handy way of gaining an impression of just how much interest parents are taking in their child’s work on Moodle. That’s as long as we don’t assume that this is totally representative of parent’s interest in their child’s education.
Nice work, Julian. Your description is clear and you model the use of Web 2.0 effectively with the YouTube video tutorial also.
I was looking for a magic parent role that auto assigned a user account for them too.. I know – too much to ask!
Cheers,
Maurice
Thank you Moodleman! I have been meaning to work out how to do this after the guys from Studywiz showed us a similar login for their VLE. I just KNEW it could be done but had no idea how to do it.
I’ll be implementing this over the Christmas break stuffed with turkey.
Merry Christmas to you moodleman and I can’t wait to see what you produce in 2009!
Andy
The 4 permissions that are all grouped together were pretty easy. It took a bit to find the view user profile permission, but I finally found it. The parental access is up and running. Thanks for the video tutorial. It was a huge help!
excellent work with the demo, it was very useful. i created the parent role and assigned some test students the parent role as instructed. when i log in as the parent i can see the students in the mentee block, but when i click on the student profile. i get this message “Details of this user are not available to you” i have been trying to figure out what i am doing wrong. any help is really appreciated.
Rajni
Hey, I have the same problem too.
Have no idea what I’m doing wrong.
The annoying thing is, I followed these directions last time julian, and it worked. Now I get the “Details of this user are not available to you”
Any ideas?
Thanks,
@taliacarbis
well done
i have create a parent role and followed all the steps given but i was not able to log in as a parent
can u please help me to solve this problem
hay i have logged in as a parent now..
but i have doubt
should the parent be enrolled in the course if he wants to see his child’s activity report for that course
I never found that parental controls were that helpful. But maybe I’m wrong.
Thank you! I’m just getting started and I’m so glad I found this. Will get this role established and use this year. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and video with all of us!
Thanks for video tutorial. I followed all of the steps to create the Parent Role and logged in as a parent and went to the student’s profile. Everything worked as explained, but I have one problem.
When the Parent clicks on the Activity Report >Complete Report > Glossary: Active Student Glossary, they can see all the entries made by students in the course. They can click on an entry of another student in the class and gain access to that student’s profile and even send them a message.
Is there a way to prevent the parent from doing this?
I have found a solution to my problem thanks to the help of Remote-Learner, a Moodle Partner. The Parent was able to access the Glossary because they were able to enrol in their child’s class. The course teacher has not set an enrollment key. Once we went in and set enrollment keys for all courses, Parents are no longer able to acces anyother student’s information.
I am having the same issue as an above user.
Roles are set, but it says you do not have permission to see the details of this user.
What did I do wrong ?
I figured it out thanks.
Moodle: User view details needs to be allowed as well.
I dont think this is in your video.
Aisha LaDon
Education Advisor, Instructional Developer
http://aishaladon.com
http://twitter.com/aishaladon
On the topic of allowing parents access to the course material.
I’m an advocate for transparency however, I’m going to say that ultimately the course material belongs to the teacher / school / education department and that the parents ‘right’ to access the information probably isn’t upheld in law.
However, saying what I just said really really really goes against my grain.
Perhaps the parents should just have access to the course outline because the actual details are really what the teachers/education system fill in. Parents would benefit by knowing the outline because they can then enhance / work in parallel with their child if they know what topics etc they are working on/towards.
If parents really want to view the course material they only need to sit down next to their child anyhow! It’s not like it’s truly hidden.
I feel sorry for teacher actually. I am actively involved in my child’s education and I want to know what they are being taught in school so I can help cement and enhance their learning at home – sadly, as I discovered, there are parents out there that think education is just the teachers responsibility and they want to beat up the teachers when their child falls behind.
In my world, the education of my children is my responsibility, the education system just provides a framework and some details but if my child fails, it’s not the education departments fault unless of course they bar me from helping my child to learn.
I think it comes down to the teachers knowing what type of parent they are dealing with as to whether they allow them access to their course materials. Some parents really want to just help, others sadly just want a point of blame.
Educating our children is a community affair involving everyone – that’s my simplistic view of the education world anyhow.