Moodle:Parental Access to student work

[TechMonkey]

Someone has asked me and piqued my interest if it is possible to allow parents to get access to student work on a moodle install. I have looked to see if there are any modules around and can't see any but I have a feeling that it isn't possible, just from the way access is on Moodle.
Anyone any ideas?

[Geoff]

Beware of the implications of the Data Protection Act.

[mark]

Why can't they use their childrens' logins?

[TechMonkey]

Why can't they use their childrens' logins?

I'm thinking that may have to be the way ahead.

@Geoff: What implications would there be? Is there a DPA problem with parents accessing their own kids work,. or is it just the whole allowing external access to work at all issue?

[Wizzer]

AFAIK there are plans to implement this properly in Moodle at some point in the future. For now I don't think there is a way of doing it nicely.

The problem with allowing parents to use the pupils' passwords is that they then interact with the course as if they were the pupil. A teacher looking to see if James has read the passage set for homework last night won't know if it was James or his parents.

A small problem, but a problem non-the-less. There may be other implications.

I don't think it can be done with a module either as the user priviledge levels are quite low level (or at least they were)

[Wizzer]

After some reading, it looks like "Roles" will be available in the next release (currently in Beta)

This basically allows site owners to create any number of roles with defined access rights to suit their needs.

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Roles

There is a very long discussion on parental access here:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=6250

Started in 2004!! Looks like someone had a go in 2005 but never really suceeded. I believe Roles will be the answer.

[TechMonkey]

That looks promising. Fingers crossed for the new version then

Ta

[mighty.grey.eagle]

Parental access sounds good in principle but there are a number of problems. I suspect that some students would not respond as positively to Forums and Chats if they knew that their parents were reading their posts. Also how would you monitor what the students were saying about names, addresses and telephone numbers? Remember: A parent can still be paedophile!

A simple solution would be to write something that summarised the assessment details and then these were e-mailed to the parents.