Doing your job – Your role

This book is aimed at educators. Moodle uses the term "teacher" to describe someone who hands out and grades work. But, as far as Moodle is concerned, you are only a "teacher" when you are in a course in which you are handing out work and grading it. In Moodle speak you have the role of "teacher". It is a mistake to think that just because you are a teacher (that is, that's your job) that when you are logged into Moodle you will be a teacher in any Moodle course. That's like saying you could walk into one of your colleague's classrooms and start taking their lesson. Well, you wouldn't do that and it's the same principle in Moodle.

Who decides who's teaching on a course

In the normal scheme of things the person who makes you a teacher in a Moodle course is the person who created the course, usually your head of department or Moodle admin. It may be that you've been given the task of creating courses. That's the role of the Moodle "course creator". They can create courses and assign roles. Interestingly, they can't delete courses. They don't have that capability. The concept of roles is intimately tied up with the concept of capabilities. Let's look at capabilities in the next section.

Capabilities

Moodle is very strict on the principle of "demarcation of responsibility", different roles have different capabilities:

• Administrator: Has complete, God-like powers over the Moodle installation. Can do, literally, anything. But if you ask him to, he probably won't.

• Manager: Have slightly less powers than the Administrator. This role is equivalent to a deputy head teacher or assistant principal. Can create and delete courses, and assign users to courses. There are some things they can't do, such as change Moodle's site configuration settings, for instance.

• Course creator: Can create new courses, and edit them. Interestingly they don't have the ability to delete them.

• Teacher: Can edit and work with existing courses, but cannot create new ones. They can grade the work students have handed in.

• Non-editing teacher: Can grade work and teach, but can't edit courses.

• Student: Can hand in work, attempt quizzes, can interact with other course members in forums and chats. Students can't edit courses, hand out or grade work.

What your role is depends where you are. For example, I am a teacher in the daytime but in the evening I am a student at evening classes. My role depends on the "context" (teacher in one place and a student in another). It's the same with Moodle, make sure you don't confuse your job title with your role in a particular context. I log in to Moodle as a user, not as a teacher. Let's look at contexts in the next section.

Contexts

What different contexts are there in Moodle? Here are the basic scenarios:

• I've just logged into Moodle. In this context I'm an authenticated user.

• I've just enrolled on a course. The fact that I've had to enroll suggests that in this context I'm a student. If my Moodle admin has made me a teacher on this course then in this context I would be a teacher.

• Courses can be contained in categories. Categories are a way of grouping together Moodle courses. When I view a category I find that I can create courses. In the course category context I am a course creator. Note that I can't create categories, I don't have that capability. If you need to create categories and find that you can't then the first person you need to speak to will be your Moodle administrator.

Your Moodle administrator or manager (from now on I'll just use the term admin to mean either role) can give you a specific role in a specific context. Just because you are a course creator in one context doesn't mean to say that you are a course creator in another.

Pop quiz – what's my role?

I've just clicked on a category to view the courses in it. I see that there is a button marked Add a new course. What's my role in this context?

• Teacher

• Guest

• Course creator

• Student

Why am I mentioning all of this

Well, you can see that there are many different ways of running a Moodle site, so we've had to make some assumptions in writing this book. This book is pitched at the educator who wants (or needs) to convert their courses over to Moodle. Because you have that role I'm assuming that if there's any administrative task that needs to be carried out then your Moodle admin will carry it out on your behalf; I'm assuming that Moodle administration isn't your job. That's why at the end of some chapters you'll find a special section called Ask the Admin.

It isn't just roles and capabilities that can change depending on your Moodle site. It's the look and feel of the site that can differ as well. Let's spend a little time taking a look at Moodle's user interface.