How to set up category level access

Keywords: assessment, feedback, grading, marking, plagiarism, referencing, reference.

What is it?

Category level enrolments enable departmental administrators and other staff who have oversight of a department access to all the Moodle courses for that department. Moodle categories reflect the faculty and department structure of UCL. In some departments these are also split into undergraduate and postgraduate courses, so it is possible to assign staff access to either of these independently. Staff can be enrolled as course administrators or with a 'no-email' role that means these staff aren't inundated with email alerts from discussion forums, but can still edit the courses within the category.

Why use it?

Category level enrolments means that staff who require access to all Moodle courses within a department do not need to be manually added to every course individually. They can be added once to the department's category and then have access to every Moodle course within that category.

Who can assign category level access?

Each department should have a member of staff who has category level access to that department's Moodle courses. You can ask this person to enrol you as the MyFeedback Departmental Administrator for your department (or a sub category within the department - e.g. for only the undergraduate or postgraduate modules, assuming the category has been set up in this way).

Before I start...

If you do not know who has category level course administrator access for your department's Moodle courses, go to one of your Moodle courses and follow these steps:

1. In the Settings block, click Users and then Enrolled Users
2. Filter the Enrolment methods to show only those with Category enrolments. Click Filter.
3. You will need to contact one of the people listed here as a Course Administrator and ask them to assign you with MyFeedback Departmental Administrator access.

If no-one in your department has category level course admin access yet, the appropriate person will need to follow the normal process to apply for this access, so they can then assign MyFeedback Departmental Administrators. You can find out more here: Moodle Category level access.

How do I set one up?

A category level Moodle Course Administrator can add MyFeedback Departmental Administrators by following these steps:

1. First of all, ensure you have the approval of the relevant Head of Department (or similar) before granting anyone this access.
2. Login to Moodle.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the Course Overview block and click Browse all courses on UCL Moodle ...
4. This will bring up a menu of all UCL Moodle categories. Find the category that contains the Moodle courses for which to grant someone MyFeedback Departmental Administrator rights.
   • NB: This might involve clicking through to sub categories such as postgraduate or undergraduate categories (if these exist). 
5. Once you have found the category, if you scroll down on the right hand side you should see a Settings block, locate and click Assign roles.
6. Find the MyFeedback Departmental Administrator role and click on this, so you can assign colleagues to this role. 
7. User the Potential users box to search for those you wish to add and then add them by clicking on their name and then clicking Add. 
8. Repeat this as many time as needed. There is no save button.

Caution

Enrolling someone with a course administrator role means they will receive email alerts every time someone posts to an announcements forum that is set to 'force subscribe' (the default setting). They can disable all their alerts, but this means if that person is actually teaching or supporting a few of these Moodle courses, they will miss important information. A better option is to enrol them at category level with the 'no-email' role to stop discussion forum emails from all courses, and then enrol the staff member as the standard course administrator on the courses they are actively teaching / supporting to ensure they still receive these communications.

Examples and case studies

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Questions & Answers

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Further information

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