27 August 2012, 13:53

Hello Forum,

I am a relative newbie to Mahara site administration, so please excuse my ignorance.  I want to upload new users to my Mahara institution by csv.  Our Mahara site is integrated with our Moodle system and we use XMLRPC Authentication.  Currently, users must log in through our Moodle log in site to initiate and establish their Mahara account.  Is there any way I can bulk upload users directly into our Mahara system bypassing the Moodle log in or must they establish their accounts in the aforementioned fashion?  Additionally, if I can bulk upload users by csv, what authentication method would I use?

Thanks.

27 August 2012, 17:07

Hello there. As far as I am aware if you upload the users to Mahara via csv (the documentation for Mahara 1.5  is here http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.5/site_admin/users.html#add-and-new15-update-users-by-csv ) then your users will need to go separately to Mahara and log in again. If they go via Moodle, as you have it set up already then their accounts will get created when they first access Mahara. The danger you run is with having duplicate accounts - ie, if you do bulk upload them straight to Mahara they will have one account and then if they go in via Moodle they will have a second account. It seems that if your Moodle and Mahara are combined then I would leave it as it is. (I hope that rather  badly phrased reply makes sense)

01 October 2014, 22:43

Mary, you may have already answered my query as our users login to Mahara via Moodle but we wanted to upload users to Mahara groups using CSV files and it wouldn't let me. something about not having the admin role assigned to this user.

Is this a known problem? Also if a student, thinking new Y7 here, hasn't accessed Mahara via Moodle, there names wont be there. I can only see 120 of our Y7's and we have 206.

02 November 2014, 18:04

Hello Helen,

You can only create groups in bulk when you have institution or site admin access. So there is no bug. ;-)

And all your users will need to have an account on Mahara if you want to add them in bulk or otherwise to a group. If you don't want to wait until they have finally gotten around to logging in to Mahara, you can create their accounts via bulk creation beforehand. See the user manual for where to do that. You will need:

1. Username in Mahara and "remoteuser", i.e.g the username they have in Moodle. These two can be the same. So you can easily copy the column where you put your Moodle username (the "remoteuser" column) and create the "username" one. It is best to create the required CSV file in a spreadsheet as you can copy and paste more easily.
2. You will need to provide a password, but students won't actually see that as they log in via Moodle. It is just required for creating a new account on Mahara.
3. Make sure you choose your MNet authentication method when you select the institution where to create your accounts on the CSV upload page.
4. Untick the boxes "Force password change" and "Email users". Since your users log in via Moodle, an email from Mahara might only confuse them and since they are not to change a password on Mahara, leaving the password. Yochange on would also not be beneficial.
5. Upload your users.
6. You can now use those accounts for adding your users to the groups even before your students have gone into Mahara.

Cheers

Kristina

28 August 2012, 8:14

Hello Laurie,

You could use the CSV bulk upload that Mary pointed you to to create your users in Mahara. You'd have to ensure though that you use the same login names as for Moodle at least in the remote username field. Then the authentication method should be set to XML-RPC as that is MNet. Then your users will be created before they log in from Moodle to Mahara. They can still not use the Mahara login form as they are recognized as Moodle users.

The only advantage of uploading the users beforehand instead of having accounts auto-created through Moodle which they have to visit anyway is the possibility to place your students into groups already via CSV file as well instead of doing that manually once they logged in for the first time.

If you use SAML single sign-on, you can set it up as parent authority to XML-RPC in Mahara and then your users can log in via the Mahara homepage by clicking on the "SSO" button or log in via Moodle.

Cheers

Kristina

29 August 2012, 14:14

Thank you, Kristina.  Here is another question for you.  I will be bulk uploading these students by csv to create their Mahara accounts.  Is there a way I can designate that they also get added to a particular Mahara group?

30 August 2012, 5:27

Hello Laurie,

Yes, you can. You must create the groups though via a CSV file as well. Otherwise it won't work. The instructions for both start at

http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.5/site_admin/groups.html#new15-add-and-update-groups-by-csv

Cheers

Kristina