Make the "[course name]::Creator" group on course folders non-removable by teaching staff

Jaime Bermudez

Every semester, we get several tickets from panicked teaching staff who accidentally removed the course Creator group from the course folder and who have lost access to sessions contained within. Often, they were trying to restrict access to students but accidentally removed the Creator group instead of the Viewer group. There is no confirmation message or warning when they remove a group. It's kind of amazing (in a bad way) that a teaching staff member can remove the very group that gives them access to the sessions in the folder to begin with. I can't think of a reason why the Creator group would ever need to be removed from the course folder. This request is to make it so the Creator group appears greyed out and non-removable to everyone except for sitewide administrators.

Charles Barbour

100%. At least until custom roles is officially released, this should only be removable by admins. Generally speaking this ability should be off by default.

In general, people shouldn't be able to revoke their own rights to a folder. Either explicitly or via removing a group's permission.

Certainly not without huge warnings, a clear indication that this is probably not really what they want to do, it is likely to fill them with regret, and it may be the stupidest thing they will do today.

Feel free to use any of that language.

Carlos Coronel

Yes, this is a MUST HAVE. I have requested this several times when talking to Panopto reps.

I will add that for the LMS integrations, they need to add some settings:

• Prevent "creators" (teachers) from removing the "class group - creators" (therefore, removing themselves)
• Prevent renaming of the top level class folder!!!! This is a MUST HAVE TOO!!! Some teachers inadvertently rename the top level class folder to something like "HW05" #!$!@#$
• Add a retention policy for the folder contents - this policy will say, delete all content on such a date, or in 365 days. Also, it will give the option to delete the class folder itself (assuming it is empty)
• 
  

Michael Espey

At the very least, there needs to be some sort of indication when the user is removing their own access. I think such a notification should be present even outside of the LTI folders.

If a user is removing themselves from a session or folder (be it via a group or directly), they should be made aware that they will no longer have access to the folder and its contents after applying the change. I think it might even work if there was an indication for groups that X group is providing their access. Something like "DEPT:COURSE:SECTION::Creators (You)" would probably suffice in many cases.

There is a use case for removing the ::Viewers group from the folder, but maybe there should be an alert that the group contains students that are enrolled in the LMS course should be shown.

Charles Barbour

I wonder if there could be a setup process when an folder is created via LTI where it asks them to set a retention policy for the folder. (Obviously it would only happen when an instructor clicked the link instead of students.)

Jaime Bermudez

Ran into this issue again earlier this week. I realize it hasn't been a month since submitting this FR, but I'm hopeful that with 16 votes (as of this comment) there is enough to at least put this under consideration.

Darren Richards

Fully agreed. We have had several tickets for this in the past. Often times, we've been able to educate those users, and the tickets have decreased-- but in my opinion Course Folders that are configured by an LMS should not be editable at all (i.e. cannot delete, change the name or base level permissions)... but should still be able to add permissions or expand visibility if desired by that instructor.

Fanahan Barry

I would agree that LMS integrations where permissions are inherited from the LMS, allowing staff to basically remove their own access is something that we would like to turn off as default.

Deborah Fitchett

This is important, and there are some other settings it would be useful to restrict staff from tweaking too. Eg when they set the "available to" date on a course folder because it seems a good idea at the time, then forget about it, then when the course is run next year none of the students can see any of the new videos and the lecturer doesn't understand why.

Aimee Green

Yes! We actually just had to put a ticket in for this yesterday, and had probably about 20 of these incidents in the spring. I don't understand how someone can remove their own privileges to a course folder that they created.

Charles Barbour

I don't get why this hasn't been fixed yet.

Why on earth would Panopto allow users to continue harming themselves (and other creators) in this way?

It would be great to see an acknowledgement from Panopto that this isn't a good user experience and they plan on resolving it at some point.