Forums | E-Learning Practitioners

26 January 2017, 12:59

Hi there,

I was wondering how schools manage their auditing students? Do you enrol them as students or viewers?

While the 'Viewer' role may seem like the obvious choice as it stops users from submitting coursework and appearing in the Gradebook, the role also prevents users from receiving module announcements (emails), viewing q-review recordings and participating in forums. This can be problematic as our auditors attend lectures and we do want them to engage in the non-assessed areas of the course.

We therefore enrol our auditing students in the 'Student' role but this does mean our auditing students appear in the gradebook with no submissions.

26 January 2017, 15:09

Hi Rumi

Thanks for raising this, as we weren't aware of this limitation with viewer access. I don't see that there's any way of making lecture recording available to viewers. I think that the reason is that the 'external tool' resource that we now use to link through to the lecture capture recordings is designed to interface with Grades. As a result 'viewers' -- who don't appear on grades -- don't see things created via the 'external tool'. This problem was not so significant last year. On 2015-16 archive, I was able to log in as a viewer, and use the Q-Review block to access the correct EchoCenter page; but we no longer have that option.

Does anyone else have a workaround?

All best

Matthew

26 January 2017, 18:35

You can allow viewers to access Q-Review via the QMplus LTI connector by granting the permission "Launch external tool activities" to the viewer role. (Filtering using lti makes it easy to find.) We give all our staff the viewer role and we want them to have at least the access that students have, so I have changed a number of the default permissions to allow that. (I'm not aware that we have any auditing students, so that's not an issue for us.)

On a related matter, we discovered recently that the QMplus LTI connector allows guest access to Q-Review if it is on a page that allows guest access, which we don't want. We didn't expect that and at present the only way to prevent it seems to be to restrict access to the LTI connector to users with a non-empty user id (which means they are logged in).

I think both viewer and guest access to Q-Review via QMplus changed when we replaced the previous Q-Review block with the new LTI connector.

Best wishes, Francis

27 January 2017, 13:13

Hi Rumi and everyone, 

Thank you for pointing this out. After reading the thread Rumi, I would suggest that you create a group for the auditing students in the particular courses that have these issues and group the students as 'Auditing'?

You can then add a restriction to the assignment under 'Restrict Access' with the setting set to: 

SET OF 1 RESTRICTION(S)

Student Restriction type must must not match the following: Auditing students

 

This would be for any assessment you do NOT want the student to partake in? This would ensure they have access to forums, Q-Review etc just not the assignments?

 

Would that help?

 

Francis with regards to the Q-Review Tool, the majority of courses are LDAP authentication which means the user must be logged in unless the course has links in them. In these cases the links would not have worked and these courses would have to be made 'Allow all'.

 

If this isn't the case you can raise a ticket and we can change the restriction on the courses which have these issues?

 

Anisa