05 March 2009, 23:08

In our Mahara Trial Implementation we have our Instituion called XXX and it is using a LDAP and Internal authentication both. Now when one user press the Leave Institution button after login it is asking for changing password. After this he is able to Login through this new password (Not the LDAP PASSWD). I fear that when one user do this it is switched to the internal authentication instead of LDAP and the database is storing this new passwd information. I am assuming this and want some information from you guys about this. How exactly this works. So, we can decide the policy for implementation. Thanks.

06 March 2009, 0:19

Hi - yes, the way you described it is roughly how it works. The user left the institution, so they cannot use the institution's authentication methods any more. So Mahara switches them to 'no institution' and switches their authentication method to the 'internal' one for 'no institution'.

At this point, the user needs a password to be set ('internal' means "authenticate against the username/password in Mahara's usr table"). So they choose one, and then can continue to log in.

The user is now of course not associated with the institution so cannot use the institution's authentication methods - e.g. the LDAP server.

Hope that helps!

09 March 2009, 20:57

Thanks

10 March 2009, 3:11

I think there should be some sort of config or flag (tick box) to control the Leave Institute button. For our organisation there is only one instituion and we don't want to allow the users to be leaving the institute. Or when the user press leave institute button then it requires apporval from the admin to do that instead of changing it to no institute (internal database). It can be the useful feature I think.

10 March 2009, 6:12

Hello Yaju,

Yes, I agree with you. However, our experience with our learners is that they don´t usually leave the institution, as they have a  tacit understanding that keeping the institution membership is part of the academic requirements for passing their degrees. We have had problems with students joining  the wrong institution by mistake (and they have to be transferred to the right one), but we have never had the problem of learners leaving the institution they have been allocated to. Nevertheless, it is relatively easy to modify the code in order to send a request for leaving, in the same way the there is a request for membership.

 

This reminds me that, at the end of the academic year, you will also have the problem of clear-up out your Mahara’s institutions of old learners, who have completed their courses and they will not be enrolled for the next academic year. This issue is going to be as tricky as in Moodle: you can program a script that deletes these old users from their institutions, but what is going to happen with their work?...

 

In the conception of e-portfolio as a personal online space, and whose ownership belongs, in last term, to the learner, students should have the right to keep their work, even though they leave the institution, or at least, to move their work between institutions.  At the moment, none of the  most common eportfolio platforms, such as Mahara, MyStuff or PeeblePad allow to export your work, although there are ongoing research projects to achieve this goal.

 

Regards

10 March 2009, 18:55

Well that sounds too ideal . But you have to assume that if someone press that by

Curiosity then ? It will create few hassles. So, we are going to disable that button.

10 March 2009, 21:32

Hi, it might be worth filing a feature request for this. I can explain why users are freely able to leave - Mahara is a learner-driven system, so in a lot of places, users get to choose what they can do - and that includes leaving institutions if they so desire. But I can definitely see how it might be desirable to prevent them from leaving institutions in certain cases, in the same way that we have controlled groups that prevent users leaving.

10 March 2009, 22:39

I am seeing one more feature that can be useful - One Institute to Another Instiute and their relationship. May be this should have some sort of controll mechanism also.

How to request a feature ? 

 

10 March 2009, 23:58

Hi - the instructions are at http://mahara.org/tracker - you will probably have to create an account on eduforge as part of the process.

08 September 2009, 4:47

Rekindling an old thread :)

Did anyone file a bug/feature request in the tracker about this? I've been hunting through but cannot find anything. (I'm happy to do this if notbody else has. :)

This is a feature we would really like, as currently we only need one institution in Mahara and would prefer not to have the grey area of 'no institution'.

Regards,

Paul.