Is Observer the right base role for a "Peer Mentor"? (Cross-post)

[mbmacdonald]

At our institution we have a variety of "Peer Mentor" (PM)-type roles: students who are placed in undergraduate classes as advisors/mentors/tutors to the enrolled students. The PM is a fellow matriculated undergrad, but not enrolled in the course (in many case, they have successfully completed the course in the past).

We have created custom roles for these students based on Student and on TA, but both have been problematic:

• When we use Student as the base role, the PM ends up listed in the gradebook.
• When we use TA as the base role, the PM gets too much access: they are able to see unpublished and locked assignments and quizzes, and course Nav links that were hidden by the instructor. It does not appear to be possible to adjust those particular permissions.

Would a custom role based on Observer work? Here's what I would need the PM to be able to do:

• Create announcements
• Send messages to entire course and individuals in course
• view discussions, view all discussion replies, Start discussions, respond to discussions
• (Maybe) post content such as files (this is not a deal breaker, but this one is definitely not possible with the student base role)

Is all that possible with observer? If not, can any of the problems with Student or TA be resolved? Thanks so much!

[greydon]

Hello @mbmacdonald 

Thank you for contacting the Instructure Community. It sounds like you'll want to create a custom role for this need. Technically, you can customize the observer role to fill these needs as all of the permissions can be customized. However, this user role is typically linked to a student user enrolled in a course. For example, parents, guardians, and/or mentors may wish to be linked to a student to view their course progress. Observers usually have the fewest permissions. Customizing your observer role to fit your needs could hinder the other traditional observer roles. Making a new custom one may be best. 

Here is the Canvas guide:

What user roles and permissions are available in C... - Instructure Community . 

[mbmacdonald]

yes, my intention is to make a custom role. But in order to do that, you must choose a "base" role. The base role has certain permissions (and limitations) "baked in" which cannot be adjusted.

Both the TA and Student base roles have been problematic for my custom "Peer Mentor" role. It seems like Observer would work as a base role, however, I don't want to run into any unforeseen issues (for example, with TA base role, the user can see unpublished content, which is not something that can be adjusted).

So does anyone see any potential issues with making a Peer Mentor role based on Observer, given my description of the Peer Mentor role?

Thanks

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @mbmacdonald,

I checked out the permissions area, and it seems like you could set up an custom observer-based role to do everything on your list.  A couple of caveats about observer-based roles...  1 - Observer based roles can only access the course during the course availability window (not before or after).  2 - When looking at the people area, even though you've given a custom role name, the user would show as "observing: nobody" and not the custom role name you gave.  This may seem trivial, but it confuses a lot of people at my institution (we use an observer-based custom role for waitlisted students).

Hope this helps a bit more!

-Chris

[mbmacdonald]

Thanks for the reply... this basically answers my questions because you did not bring up any drawbacks that are significant. So that's comforting.

I share your frustration on point #2. I actually submitted an Idea related to this: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Ideas/Roles-Reveal-Name-of-Observer-based-Custom-role/idi-.... So far it has not even been "Added to Theme" by Instructure yet.