Problem:

With a large influx of new teachers, I want to quickly setup a mentor/mentee environment using Moodle. This would enable me to assign 1 mentor to one or more teachers. Each mentor would only be able to see their mentee(s) content/comments but no one else’s.  I’m not sure how to best setup Moodle to accomplish that.

At a recent MoodleMoot, I encouraged participants in my sessions to tap into their Twitter network for real time advice. I decided to follow my own advice again and sent out this tweet:

Solutions?

There are a variety of possible solutions, but the only one that seemed workable involved a LOT of work. Or at least, I thought it did. Thanks to feedback via Twitter from Gavin Henrick in Ireland–responding to my request in minutes–I had a possible solution illustrated by his tweets…you have to read them from the bottom up to get the full flavor of the conversation:

Here’s a bit on Gavin:

So, to break it down, Gavin offers two solutions–a) Student Diary Pro and b) Forums in Groups Size 1 Mode.

Before I discuss his suggestion, here is the one I considered first:

Possible Solution #1 – Learning Diary

Learning Diary – This module is used to combine the many Reflections into one ongoing diary, a much more efficient and appealing approach for adults. There are so many individual activities in each section that the list appeared exhaustive. It’s a 3rd Party Mod not hosted on Moodle.org. 

Get it online at http://julmis.julmajanne.com/index.php/Learningdiary

This type of solution will work neatly to facilitate interactions. Of course, you can easily embed audio and/or video components to make it all the more interactive.

Here is one exchange between mentor and mentee:

Here’s what it looks like from the mentor’s perspective:

Of course, the mentor isn’t limited to just this view…if they are mentoring more than one student, they can see even more students:

And, of course, either the Mentor of Mentee can embed outside content (e.g. video, audio, and more):

Now the only problem I see–and there may be more I don’t–is that the Teacher/Mentor role enables the mentor to have access to ALL students. I would only want the Mentor to be associated with 1 or 2 students, if that. That means that each Teacher/Mentor would have their own Moodle course to manage the dialogue. WAY TOO MUCH work.

As such, I’m not sure the Learning Diary solution works unless I can allow Student/Mentee roles within the context of Separate (Force:Yes) Groups. The problem is, though, how do I assign different rights to Mentors vs Mentees? I suppose the only possibility would be to create new roles in Moodle that specifically allow mentors more rights…but I couldn’t find how to do that for the Learning Diary module.

So, as I understand it, the Learning Diary would only solve my problem if the following were true:

• Each teacher/mentor had their own Moodle course that housed the mentees they were responsible for.

And here is a relevant excerpt from Packt Publishing by Alex Buchner on the subject of Mentees:

BEGIN QUOTE:

Parent or Mentor Role

1. Create new role:
   1. Go to Users | Permissions | Define roles in the Site Administration block
   2. Add a new role and name it Parent or Mentor. Provide an appropriate short name and a description.
   3. Leave the Legacy role type set to None
   4. Change the capability moodle/user:viewdetails to Allow. This grants access to the user profile page.
   5. Change the following capabilities in the User section to Allow, which grants access to individual tabs on the user profile page:
      • moodle/user:readuserposts: To read the child’s forum posts
      • moodle/user:readuserblogs: To read the child’s blog entries
      • moodle/user:viewuseractivitiesreport: To view the child’s activity reports and grades
2. Create user account for parent:
   Each parent requires a separate user account (Go to Users | Add a new user in the Site Administration and add details for the parent or use Moodle’s bulk upload facility). In our example, the father is called Roy Harris and his children are called Frank Harris and Paul Harris:

3. Link parent to pupil:
   Each parent has to be linked to each child. Unlike the creation of users, this process cannot be automated via batch files and is a potentially time-consuming process
   1. Access the first child’s profile page and click on the Roles tab (Frank Harris).
   2. Choose Parent as the role to assign
   3. Select the parent (Roy Harris) in the potential users list and add it to the existing users list.
   4. Repeat the steps (a) to (c) for the second child, Paul Harris
4. Add mentee block:
   1. Go to your front page and turn on editing.
   2. Add the Mentees block to the front page (it can also be added as a sticky block in My Moodle) and change its title via the configuration icon to Parent Access.
   3. Log in as Roy Harris and you should see the following block:
      
A special Mentees block has been introduced to facilitate access to user information.

Ah well, I’ll have to reflect on Solution #3 some more and how it might work in my situation!

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure