21 April 2011, 0:02

Greetings!
       I'm in the process of trying to structure how I might implement a collaborative online writing project on the Mahara platform between 4th-5th graders. I'm trying to figure out exactly what the "Institution" might bring to the table. I've noticed documentation in the Mahara Wiki on the "Walled Garden" idea, but since I can't see any of those settings in my install (1.3.2), I'm assuming they've never been implemented.
       I currently have a primary default institituion which accepts SSO from our Moodle site. I've added a second without an authentication method, assuming that it membership will be "by request" only from members of the first. But I can't see what I've gained. Can anyone give me a detailed description of the difference between institutions and groups? It seems like major settings such as plugins and enablling features are site-wide rather than institution wide, so I'm not sure what this does.
       Thanks!

21 April 2011, 17:07

Hi there. An institution is really a completely separate body of people in your Mahara - so you could have for instance one Mahara with different institutions that were different schools altogether -or one Mahara where different faculties of a university were different institutions. The site admin manages the plugins etc but the institution admin manages the users in their institution - a kind of lesser admin to take the pressure of the main Mahara site admin. Groups are - well - groups of users that are either set up by users themselves or set up by the admin. I think if all your 4th/5th graders are from the same place and you want them to write collaboratively then groups would be best - you as teacher can decide who goes into which group and they can make a collaborative group view .

22 April 2011, 13:39

Mary:
       Thanks for the response. I am leaning towards groups.
       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.
       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. One thing I definitely want to avoid is more than one installation of Mahara, since the ability to support content/ePortfolios continuously through the grades would be lost.
        If you see errors in my thinking, I'm all ears. But it looks like groups it is!
       Thanks again.
                             Jeff

23 April 2011, 8:55

Jeffrey wrote:

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.

24 April 2011, 20:53

Hello Jeff,

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