User roles

User roles/types identified so far:

Instructor ("Sue Milne")

• (I'm not totally keen on the name I've picked for this role, but it fits terminology used elsewhere!)
• This type of user would be using the system for educational or administrative purposes and would have access to almost all of the system's (business) functionality.
• Key goals include:
• Upload own assessment package, validate it, try out, replace package content, validate, try, ... repeating this test/update cycle as often as instructors needs.
• Perform basic content management on the assessments they upload. (We would allow users to upload and store as many assessments as they like. At the very least, assessments would have a name & title, which would be populated from the first QTI upload. Instructors could then change these metadata as they see fit. In future, we could add additional metadata for categorisation/organisation, and possibly the ability to allow assessments to be viewed by the public, or "shared" in a more specific way.)
• "Deliver" any of their own assessments to candidates.
• See candidate progress/results on own assessments deliveries.
• (And do all of the above on the sample assessments and possibly... in future... assessments that other people have decided to "share" in some way)
• This type of user would have to log in to access this system.
• Logging in would happen via a simple web form.
• A username & password would be required.
• There needs to be a "sign up" form for obtaining an account. We need to decide whether to allow fully automated sign-up, or whether accounts must be first approved. (I plan to do off-line account creation until the system becomes more stable.)

Power User / System Administrator ("Dave", "Sue", "Niall", ...)

• This type of user has the same essential functionality as Instructor, but with some extras:
• "View as other Instructor" functionality is very useful for support & debugging
• Access system information/statistics
• Perform LTI administration, such as registering a shared secret.
• Since this is just a special type of Instructor, I plan to add a flag to the Instructor role's data, rather than having a totally separate role.

Public/Anonymous ("Random Surfer")

• This role corresponds to a user who visits the QTI Works webapp but doesn't log in. Search engines would have this role when they visit.
• I think we should give partial system functionality to this role, such as:
• Browse sample/public assessments
• Try sample/public assessments
• We could additionally offer functionality for uploading, validating, then trying out a single assessment, in a similar vein to QTIEngine/MathAssessEngine. In this case, we'd probably continue to restrict the user to 1 assessment at a time, which would encourage them to set up an Instructor account.

LTI Candidate ("Blackboard Student")

• This type of user corresponds to a candidate (i.e. student) doing an assessment via an LTI launch from an external tool.
• The student will be given access only to the attempt the assessment delivery specified by the LTI launch data.
• The system will whitelist access to secondary assessment resources such as objects/images and CSS stylesheets in order to prevent clever candidates attempting to gain access to the QTI source XML(s). (The whitelist will be determined by analysing the Content Packaging manifest.)
• NB: A single "real" person will end up represented as more than one candidate within the system by virtue of the way LTI works. This is not a bug!

Non-LTI Candidate ???

Is there a requirement for doing non-LTI testing within the new system? I don't think we should consider this unless it is absolutely necessary.