We’ve got a series of posts to help you prepare for the new academic year on Moodle. This is our eleventh post and looks at the two different programme administrator roles available to support staff on Moodle.
Programme administrator roles
The introduction of Moodle 4 in July 2023 meant some changes to the programme admininistrator role. Most course office staff who work on Moodle are enrolled as Programme administrators on a whole category (either having access to all the modules in a school or department).
To facilitate the update to Moodle 4, the staff enrolled in this way were directly enrolled them onto all the modules in their particular category.
This role retained the advantages of being able to find modules easily. Programme admins can star their favourite modules. They can access modules via the Module overview block and filter those modules by academic year. Any modules they have visited also show up in the Recently accessed modules block.
This also resulted in some changes which staff found less useful. The programme admininistrators are listed on each module’s Participants list and receive notifications from all of the modules. As we mentioned in a previous post, these notifications can be dealt with by creating a couple of e-mail rules and updating them each year. And any staff viewing the Participants list can use filters to view only students or lecturers on the module.
There are some staff who also need access to all the modules in a category but far less frequently. For them, the Progamme Administrator (category level) role was created. It gives the staff member the same enrolment and editing powers as the other role, but without the direct enrolment onto the module. While this means they don’t receive notifications from the modules, the downside is that they are unable to star favourite modules and can’t filter by year category.
Depending on your position, you might find that role suits you better than the other. You can request whichever role works for you when you are first enrolled as a course officer, but you can also ask to have your role changed at any time. The form to request intial enrolment or changes to enrolment can be accessed on the IT self service portal.
Our educational technology guide has a full comparison table of all the abilities of the two roles, but below is an edited version which highlights the main differences.
| Capability | Programme admin – module level | Programme admin – category level |
| Can star modules for quick access | Yes | No |
| Can access modules via Module overview block on Dashboard and My modules page | Yes | No |
| Can filter modules by academic year | Yes | No |
| Can access visible modules via the Recently accessed modules block | Yes | No |
| Your name and email displays in list of Participants on module | Yes | No |
| Notifications are received from Forum posts, Quickmails and Assignment notifications | Yes | No |
More guidance and support
Anyone who needs the programme administrator role on Moodle should apply for access through the IT self service portal. They will be given access to a specially designed training module and additional one-to-one training if required. Our guidance site also has up-to-date information and how-to guides.
The Digital Education team offer training on many aspects of Moodle and other educational technologies. To see details of the full range of workshops and to book, please see the LEaD training calendar.
Our next post will look at the resources available to support students to use Moodle and digital other technologies.
