Steward or Custodian? A new privileged user class to co-admin edX sites

Overview: a new privileged user class (“Steward”? “Custodian”?) able to block users and delete course-public user content (e.g. discussion board posts, wiki pages), but *not* see learner personally-identifying information (e.g. email) and private learner data (e.g. submitted assignments), across multiple courses.

Problem: At Wikimedia’s Open edX instance (https://learn.wiki) we host courses in multiple languages, and plan to dramatically expand to over 100 languages. We as platform owners won’t be able to effectively police courses in all those languages, and given our courses are open to the entire world, allowing pseudonymous learners to enroll to most courses, we know there would be abuse, spam, and inappropriate behavior that would need to be policed and acted on.

At the same time, we are committed to our learners’ privacy, and cannot give standard edX site admin access to volunteers outside our organization, as it would allow them to look at email addresses, grades and feedback, etc.

Use case: A volunteer entrusted with this new role notices (or is alerted to) a spam or otherwise-inappropriate post in a particular course’s public space (i.e. visible to other learners, not just to the course instructors). They *remove* it and either WARN or BLOCK the offending user. They have access to do so on all courses in a particular language (and may have such permissions more than once, allowing them to monitor multiple languages) in the LMS; they have NO access to learner data (Instructor tab) and NO access to Studio.

If this is already achievable in Open edX (even if not out-of-the-box but via some plug-in), we would love to hear!

Hi, this is similar to the use cases that we are working to support via our roles base access control project.

The draft release notes for the Ulmo release, wrapping up any day, are here:

This will be a multi-release effort to roll out the new framework across the platform.

@Guillermo_Viedma Can speak more authoritatively to your specific requirements.

Thank you! This indeed sounds like infrastructure that could enable the use case we’re looking for. As I read it, the roles defined in the linked document about Ulmo do not quite match our need, but presumably a role of “Moderator” (in the LMS) could be conceived and assigned the relevant privileges (in particular, editing and deletion of learner-contributed content, and learner blocking).

I understand the LMS is targeted for releases beyond Ulmo, so support is not coming in the very near future.

What is the best way we can help this development, as stakeholders and scenario owners?