Improvements to Roles and Permissions

[e0d]

At-A-Glance

The Roles and Permissions system is being redesigned to allow more flexibility for creating custom roles and stacking permissions onto roles. The MVP will include one new role: Course Author with permissions to do everything in Studio and view live courses, but no access to the Instructor Dashboard/course run data.

More information

Product specs

• Product Problem Statement: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Imgf3wXpJaoc_dw-jJwBLdkRWHNLlHyTScaNJoJQOic/edit#heading=h.nw8md6e8b4lk

• Spec: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3824648277/RBAC+Tech+Spec

• Matrix: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1htsV0eWq5-y96DZ5A245ukfZ4_qeH0KjHVaOyfqD8OA/edit#gid=908503896

Design files

Kanban board

Stakeholders

Primary Contributors

• edX
• edunext

Community release milestones

• Quince:

• Redwood: Target MVP

How to contribute

• Has a community backlog with work to pick up?

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Needs cited across the community:

-more limited roles for authors
-more nuance between instructor role and course author role
-need to duplicate and reuse groups of permission settings’
-more customization of dashboard

Goal should probably be to align with industry standards, with incremental changes implemented over time.

Also need to connect to Core Product work and consider a workflow/dashboard (in LMS? in Studio?) where:

• All roles are configured in one central location
• If there are multiple places to configure roles, it is intentional and not confusing

[github-actions]

Thanks for your submission, @openedx/open-edx-project-managers will review shortly.

[bryan-kersten]

My team is looking to lead work on this project.

[jmakowski1123]

Collaborators:
-WGU

Paulo and ASU and Bryan coordinating on subset of features required for ASU

[itsjeyd]

Paulo and ASU and Bryan coordinating on subset of features required for ASU

Yep! OpenCraft is planning to follow 2U's activities around this project, and to keep @bryan-kersten and his team in the loop on relevant PRs for ASU. We'll be looking for feedback on any aspects that might clash with 2U's plans and/or could be implemented in a different way that would better support future efforts and refactorings from Bryan's team.

[bryan-kersten]

Hi @itsjeyd Can you share here the specific PRs that you'll be completing for ASU? Just want to make sure we have that noted as we work towards larger project.

[itsjeyd]

Hey @bryan-kersten, thanks for checking in! The PRs that OpenCraft submitted for ASU so far are:

• feat: feature flag to disable Advanced Settings openedx-platform#32015
• fix: missing advance_settings_access template variable openedx-platform#32097

@0x29a If the list above is missing something, please let me know.

In terms of additional features related to fine-grained RBAC, we're back to the drawing board for now: ASU found a way to leverage existing functionality to address some of their needs in the short term. So the next step will be to iterate on their requirements for new capabilities and define more precisely what they would like us to add to the platform.

We'll keep you in the loop on that.

In the meantime, if you have any design docs or specs for the functionality that your team is planning to implement, please let us know.

CC @cassiezamparini @viadanna

[bryan-kersten]

Thanks Tim. Really appreciate you sharing this info and keeping me in loop as requirements iterate. We are in process of gathering a larger understanding of the problem set around RABC. As we get that together I will share with you here so we can be sure to capture the broader sentiment of the community before we hone in on prioritization and approach.

[itsjeyd]

That sounds great @bryan-kersten, thanks for the update!

CC @cassiezamparini @viadanna @0x29a