14 January 2009, 16:00

Hi there

I am just beginning to look at Mahara from the student/teacher point of view. I want to  create a group and then add my students to it. I am admin on the Mahara (well I should be - it is mine!) but when I go to create a group I don't have the option for controlled membership that I thought I should have. Am I doing something wrong somewhere?  Have I (done that old Moodle trick) and accidentally lost my admin rights in the process of connecting my Moodle to my Mahara?

EDIT: This is strange When I log in from Moodle I do not have admin rights - when I log in directly into Mahara without going through Moodle I DO have all the admin rights - ...?

14 January 2009, 18:49

Hi Mary,

I think what has happened here is that you actually have two account on the Mahara - one is your Mahara admin account (user ID 1), and the other is an account that you roam into from Moodle.

Note that when you roam, you won't be put in an existing account unless that is created by roaming - because that would be a security problem. Imagine if you were 'mary' on Mahara, and then some other student who isn't you called 'mary' on the moodle roams - you wouldn't want them to end up in your account! What happens is they would get a new account called 'mary1' instead.

So you probably have two accounts. In the first one, you're an admin, so you can create a controlled community (staff and admins can do this). In the second, you roamed so you're currently just a student, meaning you can't create a controlled community.

Hope that explains!

14 January 2009, 19:27

Thanks Nigel -I think I am understanding, but not 100% sure! Are you saying that if I create a Moodle admin and they access Mahara via Moodle - they do not retain that role? How do I synchronise the roles? Perhaps this would be better posted in the Mahara/Moodle integration; sorry. I have taken a look and I do have a an admin and an admin 1- and a mary and a mary1 so I guess it's back to the drawing board :)

14 January 2009, 21:55

By default, anyone who roams from Moodle to Mahara will be given a new account, with the permissions of students in the system. Of course, your Mahara administrator can then give these people staff/admin roles through Mahara's admin interface.

It can be arranged so that your moodle admin account could SSO into the mahara account, but to be honest it's a bit of bother when you could just use the Mahara admin account one time to make your Moodle admin into a Mahara one. This isn't really "role syncing", but fully-blown role syncing is going to be quite some effort because Moodle has their configurable roles system.

15 January 2009, 4:08

Nigel  I get it now! The first penny has dropped on my Mahara journey - thanks!