Locked self out of course in Totara

I was setting up a course page, and wanted to see how it looked for learners. I went ‘Switch my role to…’ and selected Learner – then couldn’t view the course since I’d made it invisible to learners. The problem here is that I was no longer able to get in to the course editing screens or menus anywhere to change myself back to an administrator of the course, since that course was overriding my administrator permissions with learner permissions, and learners weren’t able to view the course. Permissions fail.

Writing a vendor support request, I realised a not-perfect work around to get my editing access back on the course:

• Find another administrator account in the LMS list of users, and log in as them
• Go to the course page and make it available to learners
• Log in as yourself, go to the course – change your role to something else, then ‘revert to normal role’ (or whatever the term was)
• Change the course back to hidden.
• Never test how it’ll look for a learner again.

I’ll test learner view with a generic test account from now on 😉