Roles

Roles live at three levels. Someone can hold one at each: a member of the organization, a teacher in one group and a student in another, and the owner of a course.

In the organization

Role	What they can do
Admin	Everything: settings, plan, groups, members, roles — and they can open and edit every course in the organization.
Member	Belong to the organization. What they actually see comes from their groups.

Keep at least two admins. An organization with a single admin has a single point of failure.

In a group

Role	What they can do
Teacher	Manage the group and its members, and edit every course linked to it.
Student	Open the courses linked to the group, in read mode.

The role is per group. The same person is a teacher in Year 10 — Biology and a student in Staff training without any conflict.

In a course

Most people never get a course role directly — their group gives them access. Direct roles exist for people outside the group:

Role	What they can do
Owner	Created the course. Full control, and ownership is never taken away by anything else.
Collaborator	Edits the course like a teacher.
Student	Reads the course.

When roles overlap

Someone can be reached by several paths — a group and an admin role, say. DTeach keeps the strongest one, in this order:

Course owner
Course collaborator
Group teacher
Organization admin
Course student
Group student

So an admin who is also a student in a group still edits the course, and a teacher who also belongs to the class as a student still edits it. Being a student never takes edit rights away from someone who has them elsewhere.

Changing a role

From the Members page, an admin changes the organization role. From a group's page, an admin or one of its teachers changes a member's role in that group. Changes take effect immediately.

In a course opened from Moodle, roles are not managed here at all — they come from Moodle on every launch. See Teaching from Moodle.