User Roles in Open edX

Site Operators Site Operations Help
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I am looking for guidance on suggested permission for different user roles in Open edx. For example, what bundle of permissions should instructors have to work effectively. I can’t find any documentation . If you have any pointers, kindly direct me.

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Hey @startoffs - I don’t think I’ll be able to give the level of help you’ll need in as far as Django roles and permissions, but what I can do is lay out some of the default permissions and fumble through how we manage them until someone more in the know drops in here.

This is specific to our implementation, so you can ignore the stuff about Tahoe Admins but this is an outline of the staff roles we use for non-technical users:


As far as the CMS is concerned (we have our own site management console thingy that the role is primarily used for), Tahoe admins are simply users who are added to the course creator group (we have the flag ENABLE_CREATOR_GROUP switched on, so that by default Studio users cannot create courses).

On our standalone sites, we typically mark site administrators as Django staff but strip away all of their permissions to access anything actually in Django. That way they get access to all courses as admins by default without being added to the list for each and every course, without risking the site itself because putting django admin in the hands of non-technical users is inherently risky. Heck, it’s risky putting it in my hands, let alone those of our instructors…

The default role management in Open edX isn’t great, and it’s something that’s been on our hitlist for a while to actually build out more granular permissions for things like having instructor dashboard access without access to certain tabs, or instructor dashboard access without studio. Right now those staff-level permissions are stuck together as far as I’m aware, so with instructors you have to pretty much give them total control of a course and just ask them nicely/bind them contractually not to wreck the entire course.

You may find this interesting too, in lieu of actual documentation:

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Thanks. This gives me an overview.