In this chapter, you have learned what roles are and how they are applied in different contexts. We then covered the modification of existing roles before creating our own custom roles, such as Parent, Inspector, or Librarian. Finally, we looked at the management of administrative role-related settings.

Getting your head around the roles concept in Moodle is vital if you wish to add/remove functionality for a distinct group of users. As always, there is a trade-off between the complexity of such a system and its flexibility. While you can argue about the user-friendliness of the roles system, it has certainly proven to be one of the most powerful additions to Moodle when it was introduced back in version 1.7.

The interconnection among courses, users, and roles is crucial. Once this has been set up and configured properly, your Moodle is technically ready to go. However, before that, you probably want to first change the look and feel. This is what the next chapter is all about.