General Overview: User Roles

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Workplace hierarchy, at times, requires user-specific privileges to access certain resources. Sometimes because of security policies, it is necessary to isolate the user under which a process runs. According to your school's structure, you can assign predefined or custom user roles to your team, securing in this way the data that each team member or partner has access to while logging in to your school.

What are User Roles

User Roles are permission sets that control access to areas and features within the LearnWorlds Platform. Each user account requires a Role assignment to limit or grant access to specific school areas. For example:

• Separate permissions can be created for designers/ copywriters of the website so that they can access only the necessary areas, such as the School Pages or Course Pages. 
• When you are selling Business to Business (B2B), your clients can be assigned to a specific segment of users to monitor only their assigned group's progress and see the relevant data. You can create a Seat Manager role. The Seat Manager will be able to bulk import and enroll users to this offering, manage the available seats, manage their enrollments, and monitor their progress without accessing any other aspects of your platform.  For more information, you can read our respective article: How to Create a Seat Management Role
• For streamlining your internal training and segmenting your audience, you can create a User Group Manager role, that can manage the users added to your created groups. 
• You can have Instructor assistants who will only grade user assignments. 
• Your Finance department can only be assigned to the billing area of the school.
• You can assign different marketing roles to create Bundles, coupons, etc. 
• Specific permission can be granted to your support team for quickly solving user issues by logging in to users' accounts. 

So, admins (or any user with the "Manage User Role" and "Manage Users" permission enabled) will be able to cherry-pick (with some limitations) areas of the platform and group them together, grant access to specific data, and finally, assign this set of permissions and access level to others. 

The affiliates do not count as separate roles (system-wise). It is an extra option added to a user account for the system to start generating commission according to the Affiliate Management Settings. 

Role levels

There are currently four role levels: 

• User role level (Learner)
• Administrative role level → grants full access to all or some areas of the platform.
• Instructional role level → grants access to specific platform areas but limits the displayed data only to those related to the selected courses.
• Management role level →  grants access to specific areas of the platform but limits the displayed data only to those related to the user groups/seat management system/community spaces.
• Reporting role level → grants access to specific platform areas but limits the displayed data only to those related to the selected reporting segments.

For more information on the differences between the role levels, you can refer to this article.

With Multiple Schools, we offer an additional layer of access for admins in an organization:

Organization owner: The admin who creates the first school of the organization (a cluster of schools).

• Creates/Clones/Deletes Schools 
• Creates Super Admins (with specific permissions)

Super admin: A user created by the organization owner with specific permissions within the organization and at least one assigned school. A Super Admin, is simultaneously the LearnWorlds Admin of the individual schools that are assigned to, meaning they have full authoring access to their assigned schools.

• Sees their assigned schools in the Multiple Schools Dashboard.
• Creates/Clones/Deletes schools (if they have the specific permissions)

You can find out more about the differences between Organization owners and Super admins in this article.

Predefined Roles 

There is a list of predefined roles for each role level (Administrative, Instructional, Reporting, Seat, and User Groups), and you can also create new custom roles. For more information on the available predefined roles, you can check this article. 

Each predefined role has a different set of permissions enabled, which can be further edited when hovering over the selected role. 

Notes: 

• The User Roles include, by default, a system role, which is the role of the Admin, and some predefined roles (e.g., Website Designer). Predefined roles are created based on the most common needs of school creators. 
• The Admin role cannot be deleted or further modified, as it includes all the system's permissions and has access to all the school's data by default.
• The predefined roles cannot be deleted, or their role level alternated; still, any user in your school with an administrative role assigned (and the "Manage User Roles" permission enabled) can modify the selected permissions by adding or removing them. You can also reset the original permissions to the predefined state if you wish.  

Permissions per Role Level 

Permissions define the platform area which can be accessed and further edited. It’s a set of various platform areas that are grouped together and cannot be separated, as they are considered "one permission." For more information on the permission available, you can refer to this article. 

Important note: Each role with different permissions displays different portions of school pages, courses, dashboards, etc. In the example below, the Course Creator cannot have access by default to the Site Builder, Mobile app, and School Settings tabs (since those are only available on the administrative roles): 

Thus, a user who is assigned the Course Creator's predefined role will be viewing the following dashboard. 

Custom Roles

You can also create a custom user role by selecting the following:

a. Role 

b. Permissions

For more information on how to create User Roles, click here.  

How to Assign User Roles 

After creating the custom user roles or using the predefined roles, you will then need to assign them to the users under the User Management tab. You can do that while:

a. Creating a new user

b. Managing an existing user

For more information on how to assign User Roles, click here. 

How to Create an Administrative Role

You can either use the predefined administrative roles to assign to your users or create a custom role with custom permissions. For more information on how to create and assign those roles, you can check our article here.  

How to Create an Instructional Role

You can either use the predefined instructional roles to assign to your users or create a custom role with custom permissions. For more information on how to create and assign those roles, you can check our article here.  

How to Create a Seat Manager Role

The Seat Manager will be able to bulk import and enroll users to a seat offering, manage the available seats, manage their enrollments, and monitor their progress without accessing any other aspects of your school. We provide one predefined Seat Manager role; however, it is also feasible to create a custom Seat Management role, as shown here.

How to Create a User Group Manager Role

You can create a User Group Manager Role, with extended management permissions and assign a user group to them. They can manage the product they are assigned to, which consists of a group of students and maybe courses. You can find out more on how to create and assign a User group manager, here. 

How to Create a Community Space Manager Role

Community Space managers are able to View/Edit/Post/Delete posts in their assigned spaces within the school's Community. You can find out more on how to create and assign a Community Space Manager, here.

How to Create a Reporting Role 

You can either use the predefined reporting roles to assign to your users or create a custom role with custom permissions. For more information on how to create and assign those roles, you can check our article here.  

The reporting role can be of great use when you are selling B2B, so your clients can view a specific user segment on the Report Tools relevant to their user group.

Compare Roles and Simulate

You can compare the permissions that are allowed in each predefined (or created custom role) by navigating to the Compare tab.

You can also see the aspects of the platform that the specific role can see without seeing the actual data, by clicking on Simulate.

How to Login as a User

If a user is having technical issues with a course and has reached out to you for a solution to their problem, you can use the setting of "Login as a User" to troubleshoot further and replicate their aforementioned case. For more information on how to use this feature, you can click here. 

Availability per plan

The differences between the available features per plan are the following: 

• The "Login to Student's Account" feature is available for roles with this specific permission enabled.
• Trial Accounts can only create one more custom role (either administrative or instructional level) and can assign one custom role to an existing user.