About Roles

Each context-specific role exists solely in one particular context. Put another way, a role that was created in one context has no effect in other contexts (and usually is not even evident in other contexts). It exists only for use in the context where it was created.

For each of your course contexts, there is a context-specific Faculty role and a context-specific Students role, which are automatically created and populated based on who is assigned to teach the course, and who is enrolled in the course.

Additionally, for your course (or for any other context that you manage), you may want to create custom roles for different groups of people, such as guest speakers, teaching assistants, and others. Essentially, you create a role if there is a group of people who should have a set of privileges that differs from that of existing roles. As part of the process of creating a role, you can add users to it, and you can also go back and modify the list of users later. At any time after the role is created, you can grant privileges to it.

Note that a course’s Faculty and Students roles behave slightly differently than context-specific roles that you create, with the main difference being how users are added to these roles. For details, see Context-Specific Faculty and Students Roles.

If you are managing a Campus Group, then each group context has a context-specific Leader and Member role, which also are handled differently from custom roles. For details on Campus Group roles, refer to the Campus Groups Directory section.

Base roles—also called global roles—exist throughout the system. Any context manager or administrator can grant privileges to these roles, but only a member of the Administrators role can create a base role.

Note that there is global Faculty role and a global Students role, which are different from the context-specific Faculty and Students role. The global roles are intended to include all faculty and students at your institution. The global roles are probably used for things like letting administrators make announcements to all faculty and students in the school, and they do not necessarily give a user any permissions within your course context.

Users do not have to belong to the global Faculty and Students roles in order to be added to a context-specific Faculty or context-specific Students role.

Every course section has a context-specific Faculty role and a context-specific Students role. These roles behave differently from custom context-specific roles in the following ways:

The way you add users varies depending on the type of course you’re dealing with, as described in Faculty and Enrolled Students.

With students, you also have one other option for adding users, which is described in Non-Roster Students.

In general, members of the Faculty and Students roles are defined outside of the course context. The way this is done varies depending on the type of course:

With both portal-only classes and ERP classes, you also have another option—you can add a student as a non-roster student. Doing this adds the user to the context-specific role and also gives the user full student-level access to the context’s pages and features. This is an important feature because there is no other way to give users the ability to take tests and view their progress on grade sheets (other than actually enrolling the student in the course, as described in Faculty and Enrolled Students.

Another feature of the context-specific Students role that varies from the Faculty role is that you are able to view a list of all people associated with the Students role—current and former members, roster and non-roster students—within Context Manager.

For details on these features, see Working with Student Roles.