Category wide role assignment

Today has been a day dealing with roles, their complexity with permissions and their complexity of context.  One assignment that did work as advertised was this.

The client says "so and so teacher needs to be able to see the student logs".  I think to myself "they should already be able to, they are assigned the teacher role".  Upon further review, the teacher role COULD NOT see the course access logs....

After a little research, this moodle doc page was helpful to understand that its the manager role that has the rights to see the course access logs for the course.  It seems strange that the teacher role cannot see them, but perhaps its the minamalist approach.  Take things away by default and assign them as needed, as apposed to give them all this stuff even though they probably do not need and hope they don't break anything....

This particular teacher plays a role or quasi manager, where she tracks students in various courses if there are issues with students.  It seems I had three options

1 - assign the teacher site wide manager role access
2 - assign the teacher as a manager in every course
3 - assign the teacher at the category level (all the courses she needs to access are in one category)

I opted for option 3.

Now, when she enters any of the courses in the category, it is in the Manager role and now has a new option in the Course Navigation Block.

Nice.