I’ve been asked a lot lately about ‘roles of users’ and what role should you assign student users on blogs.

Unfortunately there isn’t a simple answer because it’s a balance between:

  1. How much responsibility you’re comfortable with assigning your students
  2. School and District guidelines
  3. Providing them with an environment that’s motivating

So I’ve decided to explain the different user roles and I’m hoping others explain how they choose what roles they assign students.

Roles of Users

The five roles for users you can give students on class blogs or on their student blogs are: Administrator; Editor; Author; Contributor; and Subscriber.

The roles of users in decreasing level of responsibility are:

  1. Administrator:  This is the highest level of blog access.  An Administrator has full access to all blog functionality including changing themes, adding widgets, editing/deleting Posts/Pages, changing other user roles and deleting the blog.
  2. Editor:  An editor has similar access as an Administrator but can’t change themes, add widgets or manage plugins
  3. Author: An Author can’t write pages but can write posts, upload media files to their posts and publish posts but can’t edit or approve other Author’s posts.  Authors can view comments but can’t edit, delete or approve the comments.
  4. Contributor: When a contributor writes a post it is saved as a pending to await approval by an administrator or editor.  They can’t upload  media files to posts and like authors, contributors can view comments but can’t edit, delete or approve the comments.
  5. Subscriber: A subscriber is the lowest level of access on a blog.  This role is normally assigned on private blogs where access is restricted to either logged in users or logged in registered users.

Here is a summary of their differences based on User Capability:

userroles3

Here is a summary of their differences based on access to features in the dashboard:

For more information on working with usernames refer to:

  1. Creating and Adding Users To A Blog
  2. User Roles and Changing a User’s role

Please note:

  • The blog owner is automatically added as an adminstrator when new blogs are created
  • When student blogs are created using the Blog & User Creator the student is the blog owners and they are added to the blog as administrators
  • On an Edublogs Campus site there is an extra role of user; the Site Admin User.
  • The Site Admin user has a higher level of access than an administrator; they can access all blogs across the entire Campus site in their entity without being added as a user to the blogs.
  • Site Admin users can create large numbers of blogs and users, set privacy options for the entire site (and/or individual blogs), go into and edit any blog and monitor what any user is posting across the entire site.

FINAL THOUGHTS

So now we need your thoughts.

  1. Educators -  What role(s) do you assign your students and why?
  2. Students – What role(s) do your teachers assign you on your blogs?  What role do you think students should be assigned?

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