At the moment, when a regular user logs in to Mahara, he always sees all the groups and members of all the institutions on Mahara, not just the ones that he belongs to. The Walled Garden plugin will offer some restrictions in that regard.
We (Catalyst IT) are currently working on a few adjustments to institutions so that only members from one's institution(s) are shown when searched for them by default, adding an institution screen that allows for easy listing of an institution admin as well as restricting the Online Users in the sidebar to the institution's only. That goes into the direction of Walled Garden but is not as strict because everybody can still be contacted and searched for when the search is expanded to everybody on Mahara.
I would also say that you'd be better off with groups. Institutions are good when you want to have them use a special theme, but then your users shouldn't belong to two institutions as one will always be overriding the other.
Cheers
Kristina
]]>One more question...if I have "mutliple institional menbership" enabled, does that mean that, when someone logs in, they see all the members/groups/etc. of all the institutions to which they belong at once? That's how I set up my "test" institution, and what it looks like to me.
The answer is yes.
Actually, I would have set the entire install up that way (different institutions for different age groups) if it weren't for the fact that SSO will only allow the attachment of one institution to a Moodle instance, so there's no way to automate the divisions through SSO instances.
You are right - Yet. But we had a discussion about that in the time of Mahara 1.2, with Nigel, and since then a "better integration with Moodle" is stated in the road map... but certainly it needs fundings. So at the present time, SSO let you link on Mahara institution with a Moodle instance and without an automatic grouping synch between the two plateforms.
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