This is unfortunately not possible, also not with the Community System
as some have suggested. The Community System has "institution roles"
(aka "portal roles") that affect access to features on the portal and
in the Content System, and it has "system roles" (aka "admin roles")
that affect access to admin panel features (for distributed system
administration). Blackboard does not yet offer customizable *course*
roles - those will be coming some time in the next releases.

But even flexible course roles would only permit you to grant
privileges actually exposed by the system, and our gradebook does not
currently have a set of privileges granting access only to certain
features with the level of differentiation you need. In particular it
is not possible to give read-only access to the entire instructor
gradebook, and it is also not possible to freeze the gradebook at some
point in time, when final grades have been assigned (something
indispensable for a system of record).

--Volker

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Hazel Derbyshire <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear all,
> The Leicester Medical School(LMS) has decided (on the advice of the
> University's IT Services Department) to use the Blackboard Gradebook as the
> definitive Student Record System for our Medical Students.
>
> This means that teaching staff can't have roles that would enable them to
> edit/delete gradebook items.
>
> The staff add content to folders in the content collection. These folders
> are linked into the courses. So staff can add content without having edit
> rights on the student courses. The plan was to use Business Object
> Software(BOS) to extract data that would otherwise be extracted via the
> gradebook (this has not yet proved possible – BOS can get the gradebook
> MARKS but not the data linked to – like the actual answers the students
> submitted in response to the questions).
>
> However, this has caused a number of problems.
>
> Issue 1. Staff need to see the results of quizzes they have in their
> modules. So we would like a role that can READ the gradebook, download
> results etc. but NOT write to the gradebook. Does anyone else have this
> requirement ? Any ideas on how this can be achieved ? Has anyone else used
> other software to extract data from Blackboard ?
>
> Issue 2. LMS would like ITS to configure the roles to meet our needs. Has
> anyone else reconfigured the roles from the default settings? Any problems ?
>
> Issue 3. Changing the roles would affect the whole institutional installation.
> Has anyone implemented a virtual BB installation or know anything about it
> (in ‘lay-mans’ terms) ?
> Apparently, a virtual installation uses the same application software but
> has its own database.” And so (I assume) LMS roles could be different to the
> rest of the University.
>
> Issue 4. Many of our problems stem from the fact that we want to have a BB
> course that is COURSE based and not MODULE based. With our previous vle, as
> admin, I could set up a course consisting of a number of ‘modules’ and then
> devolve admin rights over each module to each module leader. No module
> leader could affect another module leaders area. Bb seems an all or nothing
> vle. Does anyone else operate at the course/programme level rather than
> individual modules  ? Any suggestions on operational procedures would be
> welcomed.
>
> Many thanks in advanced, Hazel
>



-- 
Volker Kleinschmidt
Senior Support Engineer
Blackboard Client Support