We have found ourselves using 3 ways to name facilitators in our seminars, and wondering how to move forward in our practice. We have "site" facilitators, added by the site administrators in the seminar site settings. We have event role facilitators. We have a custom field for the course owner to write the name of the facilitator.
We have realised we need to consider three things in our facilitator thinking: access, notifications, reports.
ACCESS: When using site facilitators, we don't know if they have been added in the course to actually mark the attendance. At some point, the person's account needs to be enrolled in the course with an appropriate role. With using event roles, by default the section to choose the event role facilitator does not show up if no one is enrolled in the course with the relevant role(s) so the course owner might not realise it is an option. Obviously, typing in a custom field doesn't give access.
NOTIFICATIONS: I'm not entirely sure if both site facilitators and event role facilitators get the same notifications relating to seminars. Trying to read in the various places in Totara and in documentation didn't leave me feeling very clear which was referred to, so we will just have to test. Obviously, using the custom field of typing in their name is not notifying them.
REPORTS: All three are available in various report filters and columns, but not all report sources have all, and we have to offer 3 filters/columns while we have 3 approaches, not easy for our users. We have lots of reports and would like to simplify this if we can.
When we thought the obvious thing was to drop the custom field, we discovered people use it for visiting lecturer / presenter, (not someone with a system account).
We have large user base, so wondering if there are other organisations using seminars that have also looked at how best to manage facilitation well.
Thanks