Moodle Tip - a restricted Student Account for Moodle testing.

Granted there are multiple ways of doing XYZ in Moodle.  This is just one.

There is a 'view as student' if you are Teacher in a course, but what if you desired to let other ISD's SEE the insides of your Moodle without messing something up?  Could give them non-editing Teacher accounts … which you'll have to clean up/out sometime.  Or one could create such accounts in advance, restrict them, then provide 'hints' on the front page of your Moodle for users to use (hopefully, you'll be responding to fewer EMail request for access, etc..).

Here's an idea (actually implemented on some TCEA Area Moodles) that would allow anyone who figures out the hint to login to your Moodle as a student to see what's going on (could do the same for a restricted 'teacher account' as well).

Login as Admin
Manually create a user hpotter
Name: Harry Potter
Login: hpotter
EMail: hpotter@[yourmoodleserver] (example: hpotter@moodle.tcea.org])
Server is not setup to accept mail from the outside, but on the server itself - if Linux - an EMail account can be created to 'trap' hpotter EMail.
Password: wizard

Logout and then test.  Do NOT enroll Harry in any classes just yet.

Log back in as Admin level user.

From Admin menu go to: -> Users - Permissions - Define Roles
Edit the Student role
and make a duplicate of the student role and edit the duplicate with the following:

Name: hpotter Student
Shortname: hpotter_student
In permissions, find:
1. change own password and set to prohibit
2. edit own user profile set to prohibit
(might also want to look at other rules - blogs, as an example.  The above might be good enough for ya!)

After you've done the above, go to:
Users - Permissions - Assign system roles - hpotter Student role
and add Harry's account to that role.

Logout from Admin.  Login as Harry.
Check to see if you can change profile and password.

Logout from Harry.  Login as Admin.

On the front page of the Moodle, create an HTML block with the following parameters:

Title: Harry Lives Here!
In the body:
text that says: 'hpotter was a _".
a wizard image with the the alternate text set to 'wizard'.
This is the login password hint for anyone to login as Harry!

You could let anyone using hpotter enroll in courses themselves, OR you could 'pre-enroll' hpotter in selected courses.

Tell your teachers about this so they won't freak out on ya.
They could use to get a 100% true look at their own courses as student.
(minus the restrictions, of course).

Here's what it looks like:


Here's one site where you can try it out ... hint ... hold your mouse over the 'wizard' to see the popup hint for the password.

http://moodle.tcea.org/area5/