Implementing the Parent role in moodle

My customer says to me "I have parents who want to access their kids progress, grades etc in a course".  There are different reasons why parents want to access their kids information in a course...my job Watson, is to create a solution to make this happen.

Requirements are for parent to be able to access the grades and course activity logs.

Option 1

Steps 1 - 3 would be a one time occurrence.  I would plan to recycle the parent account.  Meaning I would reuse it by un-enrolling it from a course once the parent was done.  If I had multiple parents wanting access at once, I would have to create multiple accounts.

1 - creating a new role called Parent, based on the non-editing teacher role and give it course content
2 - modifying the role turning on/off permissions to not show things not wanted
3 - create an account for the parent

Steps 4 - 7 would be necessary for each implementation of the "parent - student" request.

4 - modify the course properties to recognize separate groups
5 - enroll the parent account into the course in the Parent role
6 - create a new group in the course called "whatever the last name of the parent and child", like Smith
7 - add the parent and student accounts into the group

Now the parent can log into moodle using the parent account, access the course and view the grades and access logs of just his kid.

Option 2

The second solution, is to associate the parent with the student.  Or to add the parent account to the student account.  This is a conceptual switch, where the association is in the User context, not the Course.

This option does NOT require me to enroll the parent account in any course.  The association is done between the student and parent accounts, not course.  When the parent logs into moodle using the parent account, they do NOT see any courses, they see the specially designed moodle "mentor" block with the students name listed in it.

Steps 1 - 3 would be a one time occurrence. 

1 - create a new role called Parent, giving it User context
2 - modifying the role turning on user permissions as stated in above linked moodle doc.
3 - create an account for the parent
4 - Turn on the Mentor block on the site front page (this is where the students name appear for the logged in parent account)

Steps for each child who will have a parent added to their profile

1 - browse to the students profile
2 - From the settings menu under Profile settings for student name
3 - Click Assign roles relative to this user
4 - You should see the Parent role created in step 1, since you gave the role User content.  Click the Parent role
5 - Search for the parent account and add it to the parent role of the students profile

When the parent logs into moodle using the parent account, they will see the Parent-child block with their kids name as a link.  Once they click the student name link, they will see their kids profile, including a list of courses that their kid is enrolled in.

Clicking on a course name will open a menu in the Navigation with links to the access logs and grades

To consistently ensure I was getting the access logs to appear beneath the Activity reports menu, I had to go to the course properties and turn on the Show activity reports.

This moodle forum helped work through this requirement.