27 November 2008, 5:10

hi Everyone, especially the team that created this great application

I would like to ask a basic question related to the need to keep multiple classes of students separated from each other when using a single installation of Moodle. At present there doesn't seem to be a way to set up multiple institutions since the SSO is inherited from Moodle. Or hopefully, I am wrong. Having nearly 400 students trying to find who belongs to each group could be really problematic, but I may be missing something. Help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, David

27 November 2008, 7:18

27 November 2008, 20:06

Hi Nigel

It is a confusing problem. What we experience is when we have 400 students enrolled on Moodle in multiple classes (who cannot 'see' each other), and they use Single sign on (SSO) ALL of those students automatically belong to the same institution which means, all of the students can interact with all others in the system. Now this can be very confusing when students are looking to form groups but don't have a class list to know precisely who is in their class.  What I would like to know is: is there a way to have multiple institutions on the same instantiation of Mahara such that when a student uses SSO from Moodle, they are directed to their class institution and don't get mixed with every other student enrolled in a Moodle course? As we expand our system here this will cause severe problems as the numbers of students increases - up to 1500 in the next few years. We want to keep the class groups separate so that privacy is maintaine, at least within a class group. The alternative is for a student to sort through hundreds of student names to decide who can 'see' their profiles and Views, not a very satisfactory solution.

I hope I have made myself clear and there is some obvious solution

best regards
David

27 November 2008, 21:21

Currently in Mahara, even if your users were separated by institution, the fact that users are in different institutions does not change in any way how they appear to other users. Indeed, so far we have deliberately kept things this way because the idea is is that people are able to network with others across institutional boundaries.

Putting aside the philosophical reasons for a second, I just tried setting up a Moodle to peer with Mahara twice, and it seems that is not possible right now.  The reason I tried this was because if your Moodle could peer with Mahara many times, then you could potentially make each different peering go to a different institution and show your users a different SSO link depending on what institution they were in. But it appears that is not possible.

Going back to the philosophy for a minute - I can certainly see how you might want to wall off users in a Mahara installation, and I guess that's a current weakness that the behaviour is not configurable. You might like to file a feature request for it? If you do, please link to this forum thread or explain your situation in the report, because I think if we did add this feature we would want to make it so your use case works (i.e. users coming from moodle into different institutions).

I hope that explains things, even if it doesn't give you an obvious solution. By the way, certainly one solution would be to have lots of Mahara installations - but maybe that's not feasable for you. 

27 November 2008, 22:14

Thanks Nigel,

Is it possible to have multiple institutions that students can select from? (BTW, I don't seem to be able to put in a feature request from that link or am I missing something?).  We do need some way to deal with very large groups and the resultant confusion that will arise if they cannot work out who is in their particular group.  We may have to try the multiple Mahara installations but our techical support doesn't seem very happy about that. 

Thanks

David

28 November 2008, 1:58

You might need to register for an account on eduforge before you can put in bug reports or feature requests... it's not the best system but it's what we have right now.

I think that actually in your case it would make sense if users from your Moodle got mapped into different groups in Mahara (instead of institutions), based on what courses they were in. Would that work for you? Example, if a user was in course CF101 in Moodle they would go into a CF101 group in Mahara.

If that will work for you, we might be able to work out a way for you to transport that information from Moodle to Mahara.

22 October 2010, 8:41

Hey Nigel, how's everything on your end.

"users from your Moodle got mapped into different groups in Mahara (instead of institutions), based on what courses they were in" --> that's exactly what i want. Is that possible now with the new version?

Would highly appreciate your feedback on this

Regards,

Lama

25 October 2010, 6:06

Hi Lama,

Nigel does not develop for Mahara anymore (cf. http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=1197 ).

I am not aware that the group mapping has been implement into Mahara core or as a plugin.

If anybody can prove me wrong, please provide the solution. I'd be highly interested to know how to set it up as lots of people are asking for that.

Cheers

Kristina

25 October 2010, 7:00

I can't say that I've seen anything of this feature either.

As far as I'm aware, there's not feature request either - perhaps we need one to poke us into action ;)

Andrew

26 October 2010, 8:41

Hello guys,

Thanks for your reply.

I really hope this feature is applied into Mahara.

We're introducing Mahara very soon in our university and we're expecting a lot of instructors asking for this feature.

=)

Regards,

Lama