05 May 2011, 5:49

Hi all,

Is anyone using Mahara for admissions? I.e. asking prospective students to upload examples of work, to make a judgement on who to admit?

If so I would be interested to hear how you handle setting up of accounts, authentication, transition from applicant to student, etc.

We are using LDAP for authentication, and I wondered about making a transition in a user's Mahara account from non-LDAP (applicant) to LDAP (student). I guess this could be done in batches quite easily at database level, as long as the username doesn't change?

Thanks,

Mike

05 May 2011, 15:33

Hello Mike,

You could set up a new institution which allows for open registrations and non-LDAP accounts. Once a student has been approved to study, you can move them to the LDAP account. For MyPortfolio in NZ we are investigating a better workflow of moving students from one institution to another within Mahara that also involves looking at how that works for managed and non-managed accounts.

We are also working on changing the approval process for accounts so that accounts only get created when institution membership is confirmed if a student needs to choose an institution. That will help to only create accounts of those that are permitted.

Cheers

Kristina

10 May 2011, 3:28

Hi Kristina,

Thanks for that. It would be great to hear how the work progresses.

I thought it might also be useful to provide members of the 'admissions' institution with ready made template pages which they can edit to submit their work - with the sharing permissions already set to include the staff who will be evaluating them.

Mike

10 May 2011, 5:45

Hello Mike,

Will do.

Your other comment is a wishlist item you could put on the bug and wishlist tracker. What you can already do right now is to create an institution view (soon to be called page), allow copying and make it a copy for new institution members.

At the moment, only site admins can auto-add users to a group upon registration. If that were possible for institutions, you could create a controlled group and have the students auto-added to it. Once they are finished with their portfolio page, they could submit their page to the group and the members, i.e. the admission board, would see the submissions. I think this may work better than giving the board auto access because the students want to show them their finished product and not something in between.

Cheers

Kristina

10 May 2011, 7:02

Hi,

Yes we considered that approach. We thought it might be a good thing to require the user to select their course when logging in, so that the group could be set automatically.

We also thought we should use a theme for admissions which hides most of the Mahara options, to make it as simple as possible to submit work. Those who get an offer then graduate to the full-featured version.

Mike

10 May 2011, 14:30

Hello Mike,

This sounds great. Hiding certain functionality may not only be a good idea for admissions but also for different user groups, e.g. young kids (not necessarily hiding the same choices).

Cheers

Kristina