Managing Page and Context Permissions
This section explains how you can manage access to pages and to subsections and how to give another role permission to help you administer your course context, along with related topics. To give privileges to your users, you assign them to roles, and they inherit the roles associated with those privileges.
In some cases, roles are automatically associated with privileges. For example, in the default setup of the portal, the following are true:
Members of the Faculty role have the Can Admin privilege in their own course contexts.
Members of the Students role can view several pages of the contexts for course sections that they are enrolled in.
In the Forums feature, by default, students of an eLearning course or members of a campus group have permissions to publish posts and reply to posts.
This section describes the privileges that you may want to grant to the various roles, including permission to:
View pages.
View links to subsections.
Managing a course section or a subsection.
Permission to view and manage features, or to take specific actions within features.
Note
The last bullet point is not covered in this section, because the specifics of feature permissions vary depending on the type of feature. For help with this, view the section for the feature for which you need to assign privileges.
How To
You may have pages in your portal that should be viewable by some roles, but not others. For example, you might have a series of pages intended only for your teaching assistants. You would manage this by creating a Teaching Assistants role and granting it access to the page.
If the page is part of a subsection, note that when you grant the role permission to display the page, you also grant the role permission to display the display the sidebar link to the subsection—though when they click this link, they will see only those pages that you specifically have given them access to view. This assumes that the user has permission to view the tab.
If the user does not have permission to view the tab, you may need to provide members of the role with a link to the subsection or pages that you want them to have. For example, if a subsection is nested within a tab, just giving the role permission to view a page within the subsection will not make the tab display for the user. So, in that case you may need to provide members of the role with a link to the subsection or pages that you want them to have.
To let a role view a page:
Log in to the portal and navigate to the page for which you want to set permissions.
Click the wrench icon in the upper-right corner of the page.
The admin bar displays.
Click the Access link in the admin bar.
The system displays the Access page, which lists all the roles defined for this context as well as all the global roles. Roles that have access to the page are highlighted in green. Roles that do not have access to the page are shaded gray.
Click the role to which you want to give permission to view the page.
The system displays a dialog asking you to verify that the page is meant (and ready) to be viewed by the selected role.
Click the Hidden toggle button to change it to Visible.
The system refreshes the page and saves your selection. The role you chose now has permission to view the page.
The Course Availability setting, located on the Properties tab of the Context Manager screen, allows you to specify a start date and time and an end date and time for course availability to students. By default, a new course does not have dates and times specified for this setting, which means that the course will always be available to students.
You can leave either date field blank. If you do not provide a start date, the course will become available to students as soon as it is created. If you do not provide an end date, the course will always be available to students once it becomes available.
Log in to the portal and navigate to the course for which you want to set availability.
Click Context Manager.
The system displays the Context Manager screen, with the Properties tab selected by default.
Enter a start and end date and time for the Course Availability setting.
Click Save.
Note
This setting will be copied over whenever a course is copied via the Copy Courses feature or rich-template mapping.
Managing access to features is done in a few ways:
You can set permissions for individual feature instances. Depending on the type of feature, this can give the roles a wide variety of different privileges. The different permissions vary by feature and are covered in the chapters that deal with individual features in the Base Features for Faculty compilation of instructions.
If you want a role to have the administrative privileges available through the admin bar—including the Access and Settings pages, you must give the role administrative privileges in the context, as described in Give a Role Permission to Administer a Context.
Note
There is another level of feature permissions—these are “global” permissions. Each global permission affects all instances of a particular feature type. As a faculty member you probably do not have the ability to work with global permissions, but if you have a user that is having trouble working with a feature, the reason might be global permissions (also called global feature operations). For help, check with your portal administrator.
In some cases, you might want members of another role to help you manage your course section, or perhaps one of its subsections. To set this up, you grant that role the Can Admin privilege for the appropriate context.
When you give a role this permission, members of the role are allowed to do the following:
Display any direct child pages in the context. For example, if you grant a role the Can Admin privilege for a course context, the role can view all the pages that are direct “children” of the context, such as Attendance and Coursework.
Display and administer all pages on all child contexts of the context, if any exist. For example, if you grant a role the Can Admin privilege for a course context, then that role is automatically granted the Can Admin privilege in all of the child contexts.
Add pages (either directly to the context, and to any child contexts).
Edit any existing pages.
Add subsections.
Administer existing subsections.
View and administer all feature instances in the context. This includes having access to the Settings and Permissions tabs for all feature instances.
Give permission to other roles to view and administer the tab or subsection (as well as remove the permission).
Log in to the portal and navigate to the page for which you want to set permissions.
Click Context Manager.
The Context Manager page displays with the Properties tab selected by default.
Click the Permissions tab.
The Permissions page displays. This page lists all the roles in the system on the right and the permissions for the currently selected role on the left. The Context admin permission is listed first, followed by permissions for each of the pages in the context.
From the list of roles on the right, select the role to which you want to grant administrative access.
Permissions for the selected role display on the left. (If the Yes button in the Context admin box is green, that means the role is already an administrator for the context, and no further action is needed.)
In the box labeled Context admin, click Yes. The button turns green to indicate that the role is now an administrator for the context. Note that when you select Yes, the system automatically gives the role Can admin privileges to all the pages in the context (if the role does not already have them).
