Permissions in a Tree

One of our users of WebLearn here at Oxford pointed out one of the current problems we have with the permission based model Bodington uses. If for example you have a course that contains a couple of pigeon holes (drop boxes). To allow students to use the pigeon holes you need to grant them upload rights. Now rather than granting the students upload rights to each pigeon hole it would be useful if you could just grant the permission once. The obvious solution is to have the pigeon holes inherit permissions from the containing course and then grant the permissions on the course. This way you only have to manage the permissions in one place which reduces the administration and chances of mistakes being make. The problem is that upload permissions in the course allow students to upload content to the course container which you probably don't want. This is what happens when you reuse permission in different tools for slightly different things. The ways around this are either to have a special permission for pigeon hole submission which doesn't mean anything in the course container or the have the idea of roles and a student role means diffrent things in different locations. As for which solution we will move towards I'm not sure.