Preventing Observers from seeing Locked Modules

[marthazumack]

Our teachers would like to put certain assignment answers in Modules in courses where students prepare for national exams. I was looking at putting it in a locked module with a pre-requisite of a submitted assignment with a minimum grade. However, it appears that Observers can view locked modules, and as many parents are observers, this could lead to cheating. Looking at account roles, I could not see a way to prevent Observers from viewing locked modules. Does anyone have any further insight into editing the Observer role, or potential work-arounds?

[kona]

 @marthazumack ​, you could create your own course role based on the student role (which shouldn't be able to access locked modules) and call it Parent Observer (or something like that). We've had to do this with our Student TA's because they can't have access to more than a normal student has access to and the regular TA role has way more access than that!

Here are a couple of guides that should help!

How do I create course-level roles in an account?

How do I set permissions for a course-level role in an account?

[marthazumack]

Thanks for this idea. However, currently, we allow parents to create their own account and link themselves to the their child. My concern is that if we create our own course role, we'd have to manually link students to parents. Is this indeed the case?

[kona]

 @marthazumack ​, unfortunately I know absolutely nothing about that. I work in Higher Ed, so that's a topic that has never come up. You might get more help or better responses from the K-12​ group in the Community. Would it be ok if I moved your question over there?

[marthazumack]

Yes, that would be great, thanks!

[kona]

Thanks! I went ahead and moved this over to the K-12​ group!

[clong]

 @marthazumack ​ I agree, making another account would work, but it would disable the parent signup feature so you'd have to manage all the parent accounts.

The rolling enrollments part adds another layer of complexity to this that I don't have a great solution for. I'm interested in what support comes up with, so please post back your progress so we can all learn for this process.

[marthazumack]

I'll update once I hear back from Support!

[marthazumack]

I've finally heard back from support, and this is a feature, not a bug. Here's what they said:

I checked with our engineers and users Observing students do have the ability to view assignments that would be considered locked. Since observers cannot submit assignments our engineers decided that Users observing students should have access to all available content with the exception of items locked by dates.

[awilliams]

 @marthazumack ​ would keeping the content in an unpublished module work for you? Otherwise my best suggestion would be to contact Canvas Support (perhaps through your local Canvas admin) and establish exactly which permission needs to be removed from your Observer role to accomplish this, and what side effects changing that permission will have.

[marthazumack]

Unfortunately, an unpublished module would not work, because we have rolling enrolment. I will contact support.

[asatkins]

Hey  @marthazumack ​!

I just saw this, are you still trying to work this out? If you create the content as a text-only question in a quiz, the student will only be able to see it when they get there and the observer will see nothing until after the student submits it. We actually have the opposite problem, we have quizzes set up like that that we want the parents to see, so I am certain observers can't see it that way ahead of time

Thanks!