Brightspace Roles and the Permissions Associated with Each Role

This article reviews roles that are available to assign to non-student users when you add them to your course site and explains the permissions provided by each role.

• Instructor: The instructor is the owner of the course and has access to all the course tools and functions in the course. The instructor can also add/remove/change the roles of any users in the course.
   
• Instructional Designer: The instructional designer role gives the same permission as the instructor except the instructional designer cannot make the course inactive, cannot change the course name, and cannot change the instructor’s role. It allows the users to grade submissions, edit components of the class, and change anyone’s role in the class except the instructor’s.
   
• TA-Lead: The TA-Lead role gives the same permissions as the instructor role except it can not change the instructor's role or unenroll the instructor from the class.
   
• Departmental Support: The departmental support role gives the identical permission as the instructor role.
   
• Facilitator: The facilitator role gives the user very limited access to the course components. The users under this role cannot activate/or inactivate the course or change the course name. It allows the user to view the content but not edit, create, or delete any content. It allows the user to view the assignments and quizzes but not create or delete them. The editing assignment and quizzes permission is also very limited under this role. Facilitators cannot access intelligent agents at all. It also doesn’t allow the users to change anyone’s role in the class, enroll or unroll anyone from or into the class. There are many other limitations for this role.
   
• Learner: The learner is the role of the students. It allows them to view the content, join discussions, hand in submissions, and check the grades of their own submissions. But it doesn’t give permission to check others’ grades or grading anything. They can see the Classlist and contact anyone in the Classlist.
   
• PALS: Peer Assisted Learning (for the Peer Assisted Learning program): The PALS role gives permission similar to the Learner’s role but the PALS role does not permit any access to the assignments, including viewing of assignments, and they cannot edit or delete threads they post in Discussions.
   
• TA-Read Only: This role gives the users permission identical to the PALS role. Most importantly, this role does not permit any access to the assignments, including viewing of assignments, and does not permit any access quizzes submissions. Also, those in this role cannot post announcements, and can view the threads in a discussion but cannot grade them.
   
• TA-Announcement: The TA-Announcement gives the users permission almost as much as the learner role has plus the access to edit, delete, and copy announcements. But the users who are under TA-Announcement role do not have any access or permission related to the assignments, they can’t even view any assignments. Meanwhile, this role doesn’t allow the users to view any submissions of the assignments or quizzes so they can’t grade the submissions. They can view the threads in the discussion but don’t have the permission to grade them.
   
• TA-Grader: The TA-Grader gives the users permission to grade submissions including assignments, quizzes, and discussions. But they can’t post, edit, or delete any announcements, content, or assignments.

8