We have a role that has some similar characteristics that we use for distributed support staff (people who work in colleges and departments, providing LMS support). We give support people a separate account for doing support work (to keep the permissions / access separate from the account they would use as students and teachers)
The Affiliate role is an account role rather than a course role. It exists at the top level. We create the new support account and then add it to the specific sub-accounts, using the Affiliate role. When logged in with that account, the user can see / search all the courses in their sub-account. When they do a user search, they only find people who are enrolled in courses in their sub-account.
Would that work?
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