View Courses Permission (Enterprise)
In Schoology, there are administration permissions that override other permissions in Schoology. For example, a teacher needs to be a course admin with Manage Gradebook enabled in order to view and edit a course gradebook. However, there’s also a system administration permission that allows a user to view and edit all the course gradebooks within a school: Administer Courses.
The Administer Courses permission is powerful and helpful permission because it lets a system admin have all the visibility and control they need in order to administer courses in their organization. As helpful as it may be for a lot of system admins, it’s really too powerful to grant to all the types of users who may need to see information in courses across an organization. In this case, these specific types of users may need to view the information in all the courses, but they shouldn’t be able to make changes in all the courses.
The View Courses permission enables users to see important information in courses without making changes.
Configure the View Courses Permission
The View Courses permission can be found in User Management in Permissions.
To enable the permission for a role across your organization:
- Click Tools.
- Select User Management.
- Select Permissions on the left.
- Under the Administration Settings section, check the box to enable View Courses for a role. This will enable all users in this role across your organization to view courses for their school building.
- Click Save permissions.
A read-only view of Bulk Edit
The Bulk Edit area within a course is helpful for course admins who want to view or edit information related to their course materials all on one page.
For organizations with the View courses permission enabled, you can also configure the View materials settings permissions to give certain course admins a read-only view of the Bulk Edit page.
System Admins can configure this permission in the As a course admin this role can... section of the Courses permissions in Manage Users.
The View materials settings permission must be enabled for a role before the Manage materials permission can be enabled.
For users with View materials settings enabled and Manage materials disabled, the following image displays the read-only view of Bulk Edit:
How do users with View Courses enabled access courses in which they are not enrolled?
Users with the permission to View Courses in their school(s) can open the Courses dropdown, click My Courses (top right), and view the Course Listing area.
With view-only access to the Course Listing area, users can browse and open course sections in the school(s) they have permission to view.
What does a user with View Courses enabled to see in courses in which they are not enrolled?
The user will have view-only access to the following areas of the Course Options:
- View Course As
- Info
- Recycle Bin
Materials
Users can see the full course materials list for the course and view items like graded materials and files.
Users with View Courses enabled are not able to click into apps or web packages. When these items are clicked, a Private Access Only message will appear.
Calendar
Users may see the Upcoming feed at the right of the course and click on materials with due dates to see more information about the material. Click on the calendar icon to scroll through days, weeks, and months of the year to see more materials and events for the course.
Users are able to navigate to materials from the calendar view, but they cannot access event pages from the calendar view.
Updates
The user can view updates posted to the section but will be unable to edit/delete the updates.
Attendance
The user can view attendance taken for the course, but cannot make changes to this area.
Members
The user can view the members of the course, but cannot manage the roster.
Users with View Courses enabled can reset the Course Access Code and download Parent Access Codes from the Members page.
Workload Planning
The user can view the Workload Planning page and toggle through the calendar and Student Workload fields to view different dates and workloads.
Gradebook
Users with View Courses enabled:
- The user can see a read-only gradebook view including filtering options.
- The user can access the read-only Bulk Edit from the gradebook. This allows them to see the settings for course materials in one view.
- The user can print or export grade reports from the options menu.
Grade Setup
For users with View Courses enabled:
- The user can view the categories, scales, rubrics, and grading periods associated with the section.
- The user is unable to make changes to any settings in this area.
When users are enrolled as members (rather than a course admin) in courses, none of the abilities enabled through View Courses apply. For example, if a user role has View Courses enabled, they are not able to see a read-only gradebook or read-only attendance page in courses where they are enrolled as members. Instead, they see grades and attendance they have received as course members.
Keep in mind that the same considerations do not apply to users in courses where they are enrolled directly as course admins. For example, a user’s role may not have View attendance enabled, but if View Courses is enabled, then the user will see a read-only attendance page in courses they administer.