Roles: An Overview

For a step-by-step guide on setting up Custom Roles, see these modules on The Drop.

System Roles Vs. Custom Roles

System Roles are pre-built Roles each with their own set of capabilities. Custom Roles are Roles created by a super admin and can be customized with their own set of Abilities depending on the access the admins need. Together they are known as Roles.

For details on what each System Role does, see this article.

What is a Role?

Roles allow you to, delegate various responsibilities to different Admins in the LMS.

Custom Roles allow you to permission specific Abilities depending on the access the Role Admins need to perform their duties.

As a Super Admin, you can allow user access to any tab in the admin tool, except for the System tab, via Custom Roles. Some of these Abilities may include access to only manage users at their location, generate Reports, or Manage Homework to mention a few. 

 For certain features, such as reporting or user management, you can restrict a Custom Role’s audience.

Building a Role

Click the gear button to navigate to the Users tab and select the ‘Roles’ pill.

Click the blue ‘Create Role’ button, and give the Role an appropriate title and description. Next, you’ll see an area to add Role Administrators followed by an area to define the Role Audience.

Start with adding Administrators (an administrator is a user whose abilities are defined by this Role and can be any user). Adding Administrators is done through the rules engine. You can define individual users, or just as easily create a larger group of Administrators through Profile Fields.

Once you’ve added the Administrators it’s time to define the Audience. An Administrator’s Audience consists of the users available to manage and see (the audience is also defined using the Rules engine; learn to love that engine).

Delegate the What

The next step is selecting the Abilities for the administrators. We always recommend thinking through ‘Who needs to do what’ before you set up these Abilities. This helps you simplify what Abilities to delegate as you navigate the array of options.

Scroll past the ‘Role Audience’ section and you’ll encounter a ‘Role Abilities’ section:

These abilities correlate to all tabs in the Admin Tool—except for the System tab, which only Super Admins can access (note: Page Admins have very limited access into the System tab for managing Widgets, see the System Roles guide for more info). The only other areas that a Super Admin cannot delegate are: User Groups, Classes, and Roles pills under the Users tab.

To the right of each Ability, there are three types of access you can give for an admin tool tab:

No Access — This restricts a role admin from ever seeing the tab when they access the admin tool.

Full Access — This gives full access to the admin tool tab and the associated pills within the tab.

Custom Access — This allows you to pick and choose which pills you’d like to delegate within a given admin tool tab by toggling a pill from Locked to Enabled.

Overall, there are a lot of ways to slice and dice Custom Roles. Again, keep in mind the business case for delegating abilities before you build out a Custom Role.

Having trouble thinking of how to use Custom Roles? Below are a couple of common examples we see.

Module and Content Segregation

Admins who have a specific and limited Audience can be set up to manage content only for those users in their Audience.  Any Modules or Enrollments added by a user in this Role will automatically be permissioned to the audience Attached to that Role.

These Admins only have access to view or edit Modules and content that they have added themselves or which has been added by another user with the same role.

Note: if the Role has an “admin’s value” rule applied to define the audience, only those users with the exact same role and admin’s value will be able to see and edit the same modules, enrollments or content.

Create a ‘Franchise Content Manager’

1. From within Admin > Users > Roles select Create Role
2. Enter the title and description as desired
3. Assign the Role Administrators
4. Select the appropriate rules to filter the audience down to the desired level then select Save Changes and back to Role. 
   
   In the example below, the Audience is all users within ‘Franchise A’
   
5. Select the appropriate Role Abilities
6. Change the status of the new Role to Active

Create a Module as the ‘Franchise Content Manager’

1. Log in as a user who has the new Role assigned
2. From within Admin > Modules select Create Module.  If the currently logged in user has more than one role assigned, they will be prompted to select the role to associate with the module - select the newly created role and then Create Module.
   
   

The audience of the selected role will be automatically applied to the newly created module and cannot be changed - only further restricted with additional rules.

Note, the Audience will be locked and accessible to only the Role Audience and will not be able to expand the Audience once the permissions have been set and saved. See Module Permissions Locked Audience. 

1. Enter the title and description
2. Next, select the content items to appear in the module.

You will only see the types of content that you have the “Manage” ability for and only content items you or someone in the same role as you have added.

1. Select Module Permissions and note that the audience of all ‘Franchise A’ users is already Locked on the module by default.  Additional rules can be added to further restrict access.
2. Select back to Module when finished
   
3. If you wish to create new tags to add to the module, you must have the Manage Tags ability.  You may still select from existing tags without this
4. Define any other settings desired and select when to activate the module

Delegation of Super Admin Content Management Tasks

To have the same experience with management of modules and content as today (with access to all modules, enrollments and content in the system) a user must have a role assigned to them with an audience of all users (or no audience defined).

This ‘Partial Super Admin’ can be created to manage specific areas of the system with full control, without having to provide them with access to the other areas they do not need.  Any role without a defined audience will automatically have this ability.

Any modules created by this role will be accessible to all learners in the system unless further restrictions are applied to the module/enrollment audience.

Anyone that is assigned this role will have access to all the modules, enrollments and content within the system.

Create a Partial Super Admin (aka ‘Global Content Manager’)

1. From within Admin > Users > Roles select Create Role
2. Enter the title and description as desired
   1. Assign the Role Administrators
3. Leave the Audience as default (All Users in Audience)
4. Select the appropriate role abilities, for a global content manager it may be the following:
   1. Modules > Full Access
   2. Content > Full Access
5. Change the status of the new role to Active

Create a Module as the ‘Global Content Manager’

1. Log in as a user who has the new role assigned created in the steps above
2. From within Admin > Modules select Create Module
3. If the currently logged-in user has more than one role assigned, they will be prompted to select the role to associate with the module - select the newly created role and then Create Module
   
   
4. Enter the title and description.
5. Next, select the content items to appear in the module.  
6. Select Module Permissions and note that there are currently none applied to this module, if desired apply rules to restrict the content.  When finished select Back to Module.
7. If you wish to add tags to the module, you must have the Manage Tags ability in order to create brand new ones.  You may still select from existing tags without this ability.
8. Define any other settings desired and select when to activate the module.