Moodle groups screenshots

Moodle Roles

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Standard_roles

Roles are managed at the system administrator level. 

Screenshot shows two custom roles at bottom. (Department Administrator and OCW Administrator).

Defining Roles

Roles are very powerful and granular in Moodle. You can set roles that correspond to modules, for example, like Forum Moderator. The screenshots below are all of the same, continuous Role configuration page.

 "Master" Roles can control a cascade of other roles in the system. So an Instructor can set permissions for a TA and a TA could set parameters for Graders and Students, if so configured.

Assigning Roles

Assigning roles to individual users is an arduous process out-of-the-box. There is no built-in, automated way to batch-assign roles to all Students or all Instructors across an institution. There's a simple, back-end function for it, but it is difficult to know how it will scale across, say, a student body of 20,000 and an Instructor corps of 5,000. The system is set up for student self-enrollment in courses, which may mitigate the automation issue in some contexts.

Moodle Groups

Groups are managed at the course site level and are fairly flexible. The UI workflow can be a bit tedious, but there are options for auto-creation of groups within a site. Enrollment keys allow users to enroll themselves into a course, usually there is one key for the whole course defined in the course settings. However, if you define a *group* enrollment key then not only will entering that key let the user into the course, but it will also automatically make them a member of this group.

Group Mode is set within the Course Settings Module. The group mode can be one of three levels:

1. No groups - there are no sub groups, everyone is part of one big community
2. Separate groups - each group can only see their own group, others are invisible
3. Visible groups - each group works in their own group, but can also see other groups

The group mode can be defined at two levels:

1. Course level
   1. The group mode defined at the course level is the default mode for all activities defined within that course
2. Activity level
   1. Each activity that supports groups can also define its own grouping mode. If the course is set to "force group mode" then the setting for each activity is ignored.

Roles can also be assigned locally, within the context of a site and renamed to match the context.