Sometimes (often) we find that the system or course/organization roles included by default in Blackboard do not fit the profiles we want to define. We may be missing or have excess privileges associated with these roles, or we may have similar but not identical profiles that need to be differentiated.

The easiest way to solve this situation is to create a custom role for each of those profiles we need. First, we will copy the existing role that most closely matches (in terms of privileges) the one we want.

Go to Control Panel > Users > Course and Organization Roles or Control Panel > Users > System Roles and click Copy in the contextual menu of the role to copy. Edit the role name and give it an identifier.

In the case of course and organization roles, below the role properties, you can choose whether this new role should be treated as an instructor (that is, it appears in the instructors panel in courses).

Also review the specific LTI role assigned to this new role, so that your third-party tools recognize them as participants, instructors, or other types of users.

Also select whether it has full permissions over course files. Not having these permissions means that the files uploaded will not be visible to users, so we recommend that if this role will work on creating/updating courses and organizations, it should have these privileges.

Finally, we can limit the management of course enrollments, so that this role can only add/edit/delete users with, for example, the Student role but not others with roles such as Teaching Assistant or Grader. These privileges are always subject to the role being able to manage enrollments (which you can configure in the next step).

The privilege editing page opens automatically when saving a copied role. If we do not change anything at this moment and later decide to edit privileges, we will be able to edit them to adjust them to our purposes.

Once the role is created, we can assign it to users.