Advisor role - from concept to implementation

I unveiled a new process last week for my customers to use an "advisor" concept in our moodle.  The idea is to allow a teacher, aid or someone in a school district access to the online courses that their district is sending its students through.

The teachers are a little busy and not typically from the district where the students are coming from.  The district wants someone to watch out for its own students.  Makes sense.  I have to make the translation from idea to reality.  Its ok, its a conceptual thing, which I typically do pretty good with....

So, I got the first official request from my customer than sounded like this.  "James, can you set up billy bob in district x so he can see his students".

These are the specifics to implementation, complete with a couple little "ahaa", that I had not "ahaaed yet".

1. Check to see if the billy bob had an account in our moodle.
2. Checked my admin report to see how many students where from this district.
3. Browsed each of the students from the district, adding billy bob in the Advisor role into each of the students profiles. that's associating billy bobs account with the students.
4. Logged into billy bobs account
5. Turned on the Men tees block and renamed the title "District x students"
6. Turned off a couple other blocks, simplifying the interface as much as poss. for billy bob
7. From billy bob District x block, clicked a student and their course and checked to see if all the activity reports were showing in the navigation block.  They were not.
8. Browsed the site in a new browser and logged in as myself (admin) went to the course settings and turned on Activity Reports = yes.
9. Refreshed the browser where I was logged in as billy bob, checked the activity reports again and, the Activity Reports were there...
10. Went back to the other browser where logged in as myself and planned on enrolling billy bobs account into the course in the student role....but,  This was my "ahaa".  I realized that the account would look like a new student and not an advisor, which could confuse the teacher.
11. I created a new role called Advisor in course based on the student role and tweaked it to give it a little more permission, specifically to view assignments and quizzes.
12. I enrolled billy bobs account into the course in the new Advisor in course role.

Finally, I sent an email off to the billy bob, using the email assoc. with his moodle account, with brief directions on how to access the activity reports.

Moral of the story?

Moodle is flush with capability, like roles. When you start to implement great ideas, you realize some granular implementation that was not completely flushed out.