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Deploying Front Page Activities Based on Role

Site Administrators can use the front page to deploy site-wide activities. The advantages to using the front page are: 1. You can control who sees which activity based on user role (targeting the user) and 2. The activity appears on the MySites (Front Page) page upon login.

In this example, we will use the Instructor Student Survey — a questionnaire activity that was deployed to two different populations on CCLE. If you are deploying an activity to only one group then you can alter these steps accordingly.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Only one site-wide activity can be administered at a time. For this reason, it is imperative that you obtain CIG approval.

Part 1: Making your lists to populate the front page roles:

  1. Go to User Bulk Actions in the Admin Panel and use the Filters (Show Advanced) to generate the first list (All Students in this example).
  2. Repeat the steps above to get the second list (Instructor for this example). You can create filters based on term, if desired. For each category add that list to Selected Users and repeat for additional categories and/or term.
  3. For each list you create, make sure one of your filters is Authentication = Shibboleth. This is an important step because Moodle makes you specify this when uploading your users into the Front Page. See screen shot below Part 4: Step 2 (default values).
  4. Once you have your list the way you want it, go to Selected Users (make sure they are selected) and choose Download. A new screen appears, choose csv format.

Part 2: Remove Duplicates
On CCLE, students and instructors share roles, so it very important to remove duplicates (your survey may not work as expected if you don’t).

  1. Merge the Instructor list into the Stduent list (File > Import).
  2. Use the remove duplicates feature in Excel.
  3. Save this file as the Student list.


    Why is Step 2 necessary? This is necessary for the following reasons:

    a. Moodle filters are limited (they are not conditional, but rather subtractive). For example, if you were to make a filter that included Instructors and then filter by Students, the result would be only Instructors that also have Student roles. In this example, the objective is to create a survey list of all students and then eliminate instructors from that list.

    b. instructors can, and often do, have the role of student on CCLE (due mostly to being students in collaboration sites.) The way CCLE is currently set up, it is much easier to do a global search by student role. (Alternately, you could search student role by category as a way to eliminate instructors who also have student roles (on collaboration sites), but this method would be very time-consuming and it is not recommended. Merging files and then removing duplicates is a much easier way to obtain the same results.)


    c. If your Front Page roles contain duplicates (deploying to more than one group) then your survey may exhibit unintended behavior. (When a user is assigned more than one role, Questionnaire defaults to Student role.)

  4. Now you should have two lists (instructor and student) that do not contain duplicates.

Part 3: Add roles and course name to Excel

  1. Specify new labels in Excel called role1 and course1 for each list
  2. For instructors use the Non-editing instructor role (role ID = “4”). Using this role ensures that instructors will NOT have editing rights to the front page. Just put the number in the column in Excel.
  3. For students use the Student role (role ID = “5”). Just put the number in the column in Excel.
  4. For both lists put ccle in the course1 field (this is the shortname of the front page)

Part 4: Upload your files into the Front Page roles

  1. Go to Upload Users on Admin Panel and select each of your files to upload.
  2. Make sure settings look like this:
  3. Your front page will now be populated with the new roles. (To check go to Front Page roles in the Admin Panel.)
  4. Go to front page and Turn Editing On to see front page blocks. Turn on the Menu block and add a questionnaire.
  5. Make your activity. In this example, we are making two surveys using questionnaire for each group.
  6. Hide the Menu Block.
  7. Make an html block to hold the link to your activity. In this example, we are making two html blocksblocks.
    8. and paste the links to the survey into
  8. Label each block and labelblock(s) accordingly.

Part 5: Set Permissions

  1. Set each of the questionnaire’s permissions so that the different roles (groups) cannot view and submit each other’s survey AND set permissions that allow each group to view and submit their own survey.
  2. Set the permissions on each block (Students cannot view Faculty Survey and vice versa). (In this example, the Instructor Survey block has for the student role: view block = prohibit.)
  3. Set the permissions on both html blocks so that Guests and Supporting Admins cannot see the surveys.
  4. Test your surveys with actual users to ensure it is working correctly.
  5. When your survey is ready to go live, go to the front page blocks and click the eyeball to unhide.

Best practice: For surveys, use the questionnaire activity in CCLE (do not use Feedback activity).

Contact the author of this article with questions.

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