Setting up an advisor in moodle...

How to assign an advisor account to a student account.

This is the relationship.  The advisor account is assigned a relationship to the student account.  First set up the advisor role based on this moodle doc.  You can call it Advisor, you do not have to call it parent.  You can call it fred if you like.  The important thing is to assign the role User context and to allow the role the user context rights described in the moodle doc.  Once the role is set up, add it to the student account who the advisor will be helping.

Specifically, select the student account and go to the Settings | Roles | Assign roles relative to this user.  Click on the Advisor role and then browse to the advisor account and add it to the students account.  Got that?

You can assign the advisor account to as many student accounts as you like.  You can also add as many advisor accounts to a student account as you like....extensible solution.

After associating the accounts, log into the advisor account and turn on the Mentees block.  That is a moodle 2.x block specifically for this purpose.  The Mentees block shows all the students that the advisor account has associated with it.  You you now choose a student, and their course(s) and view the results of all the submissions they have made in the course.  The advisor call also see what the student has not submitted and their grades.  The advisor reports even include a course completion view that shows the last things the student has accessed and when!  Nifty indeed!

At this point, the advisor or advisor account is not associated or enrolled in any courses.  The advisor account is not able to view course content.  If that is a problem, you simply have to enroll the advisor account in the course needed to view as a student.

If the advisor role needs to see course content, enroll the advisor account in the course as a student.

You will know this when viewing the home page of the advisor and seeing then both the courses and the Mentees block.