The intention here is that it should be possible to mark a course, and all activities within it as read-only. The primary purpose here is for course rollover and/or archive to give students read-only access to a course after it has been completed.

The approach proposed here at the 2015 Melbourne Moot was:

1. provide a way to say that a course, activity, etc. is in read-only mode. This could be a simple checkbox, or it could be a fromdate kind of thing.
2. when checked, we modify has_capability() to return false for all capabilities which are marked as being write capabilities
3. we have one capability to change that setting. That capability must be a read capability (otherwise it can never be disabled)
4. the read-only applies to admins too

Current barriers:

1. mod_assign still has a capability for whether you can submit, which is used to show you if you have any submissions. It shoudl show your existing submissions regardless of your current capability
2. UI mockups + consideration of UX

Other thoughts and notes:

1. Have a cap to enable the setting too - probably different to the disable cap (don't want it to be turned on by mistake)
2. Start with a UI to allow setting/unsetting of the field. Shown in the course settings dropdown somewhere to those with the cap
3. Also show in activity settings dropdown
4. Need to think about how to make this apply to child contexts in a sane and sensible approach
5. Need to check for other locations that abuse capabilities