Assigning teaching staff
If you are teaching on your own in your own Moodle, you won't have to worry about working with fellow colleagues. Each member of staff in Moodle will usually fall into one of the following categories:
- Administrator: Has complete control over a Moodle. Equivalent to a chief executive or a school principal.
- Manager: Can create and delete courses. They do have the option of coming into your course and doing your job but, if they are traditional managers, they probably wouldn't know how to.
- Course creator: Can create new courses and edit them. By default, course creators can't actually delete courses.
- Teacher: Can edit and work with existing courses, but cannot create new ones. This role can add new resources and activities, change topics, and settings.
- Non-editing teacher: Can grade work and teach, but can't edit courses. This role will only become relevant when we get to interactive course content in later chapters.
It depends on the management structure in your school or college but, in my experience, the approach that has worked best is to have a head of department/faculty leader/team leader/Moodle champion, delete as appropriate, as the Moodle manager in their Moodle category. They then create courses for their teaching staff. If you are a Course creator then it doesn't need me to tell you not to simply drop a Moodle course onto one of your unsuspecting colleagues without discussing it with them first. I've known this happen and it caused nothing but a great deal of animosity and a fair amount of anti-Moodle feeling.
Let's take an example. For the rest of this book we will look at converting the Backyard Ballistics course to Moodle. However, there are other courses in the physics syllabus that need converting, including "Jet in a Jam Jar". As a course creator, you can create a course, and then assign it to another teacher who can "develop" the course from then on.
I am going to create a new course and then assign it to Mr. Wild as the editing teacher.