How to handle a request for a parent to view their students course information...

This has been a common request, well, at least a request made more than once.  We serve the high school community and offer rigorous 3rd party courses to our customers (k12).  We sometimes have parents who want to see what their little precious is up to in their courses.

My challenge then is to solve this.  Solve meaning the best way to handle this request.  This is my initial attempt to think through this.

My customer was initially thinking push the data to the parent.  Create a report, export the data from moodle, somehow, and push (email) the data to the parent.  That is 20th century.  We need to enable the parent(s) to pull the content that they want to see.  Enabling the parent to see their kids data means creating an account, assigning it to a role and possibly a group and then enrolling the account into a course.  Let me try to state that again.

High level steps to allow parent to see their kids data in a course

• create an account for the parent to use
• create a role to enroll the parent account into
• enroll the account into the course
• possibly create a group to put the parent and student enrollments into (to hide the other students data from the parent)

Constraints are things that have to happen, or cannot happen, depending on how you look at it.  The first constraint is the parent can only see their childs' data in the course.  Typically, there are multiple students in the course.  The parent can only see their kids data, no one else.  That is a big constraint.

I need to test this scenario and then report back.

These are my steps that have allowed some success

1 time operations

 These are 1 time operations because I will use the same account and role numerous times to satisfy each request when it comes.  This also means, I will need to un-enroll the account when the parent has had time to look at their kids grades.  This is a shared account, which also means I should reset the password each time I assign the account to a new course.  It is possible that a parent could remember the password and log into the site, months later and see the account logged into a different course.  It is unlikely that a parent is really going to give a #$#@ about some other course or kids grades, but technically, I should document the password change requirement in the process.

• create a new account called parent, using whatever password and other details you want
• create a new role based on the guest role, since this role should be limited.
• edit the role and allow to view grade details, specifically, I am allowing to view both grader and user reports

Steps to follow each time the account is assigned to a new course

• Browse the course
• Settings|enrolled users|enroll users|
• browse to the account to be enrolled as parent
• enroll the account IN THE PARENT role
• return to the course page
• Activate the group setting for the course : Settings|Edit Settings|Groups|Separate group, save change
• Settings|Groups|Create Group, name the group parent, save
• With the newly created group highlighted, click the Add/remove Users button
• Add the parent account and the student account to the parent group.

Now, if you log into the moodle using the parent account, you should see the course appearing.  Entering the course and looking in the Settings|Course administration block, you should see only the Grades icon.

When you click the Grades icon and enter the gradebook, you only see the student who is added to the parent group.  The other course participants and their private data is hidden!

Ureka.