Managers and Parents
We could also call this the “Why is there a Role assignment separate from the enrollment records?” article. You do not need to assign roles separate from enrollments. Almost always the role is part of the enrollment. However, the platform supports roles in a variety of contexts besides course enrollments so Conduit also provides ways to do this. The most common use of context based role assignments is to create a Parent or Manager.
Sometimes it is useful to create users in Open LMS who have enrollments in other users In order to see what those users are doing. Mentors, managers, parents, advisors all have this sort of relationship with the system. They are not really enrolled in courses but need access to the activities of selected learners.
These are the complete steps to set up Parent or Manager access using Conduit.
1. Create a Parent/Manager/Mentor role, available in the user context, and set up with the permissions you want. Non-editing teacher is a good starting point for these types of roles. Note the name and shortname of the new role.
2. Check Conduit > Settings > General settings and note what the role assignment key field is set to already. This would be used for both enrollment and role assignment actions. The options are name or shortname to be the key identifier for role assignments.
3. Check the Conduit Role assignments mappings located at Conduit > Settings > Mappings. All the mappings can be changed to match your needs. Once set, you can download the csv headers file. The csv header might look as follows:
action, context, student, parent, role, timestart, timeend
4. Create an account for a parent. If you are using an external type of authentication (LDAP, CAS, etc.) but you do not authenticate parents’ accounts against it, you can set up their authentication as “manual” or “conduit” for internal authentication.
Tip: Internal authentication types use the password strength and rules set in the Site administration > Security > Site security settings page.
5. Create a role assignment for the parent. For testing purposes or for single user changes you might use the Conduit > Edit page’s Add a new role assignment tool. Or you can use the CSV header from step 3 to create a batch file of parent assignments. The role should be identified by either the name or shortname, whichever mode is already in use for the regular enrollments in Conduit. The context will be either “user” or “course”. Please see the Conduit Mappings article for more details on the mappings and valid values for more details.
6. Consider adding the Mentees block to the user dashboard page to present the Parent or Manager with an easy view of the learners they are associated with. The block can be renamed in the settings to display whatever descriptive name you prefer. It provides a list of users and links to their detailed reports.