01 February 2013, 10:01

Does anyone have examples of how they adminsitratively manage their Mahara instances?

I'm interested in hearing about how others:

1) Activate/Deactivate/Archive Groups in Mahara - especially for faculty, who may want their course groups organized by semester, etc.

2) Organize Groups in Mahara - either via one Institution or Many

3) How you Use Institutions for Organizing Users and Groups

4) Thoughts on how you Provision accounts

5) General Tips for Administrators of Mahara instances

I'm interested in learning more ...

Eric

03 March 2013, 19:14

Hello Eric,

Sorry for the long silence on your questions. There are multiple possibilities for you to manage groups.

1. Use group categories to be able to filter your groups. Group tags are already in development, but the work has stalled for the time being.
2. From Mahara 1.6 on you can define the "editability" of a group by its members, i.e. beyond this edit timeframe, only admins can make changes. See http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.6/groups/create_group.html#create-a-group-as-a-user (#10 and #11 in the screenshot).
3. Create groups via CSV file. You can then change the groups' names easily by simply uploading an updated CSV file. You can also add users to these groups via CSV file and remove them as well.
4. Use the academic term / year in the title of the group to distinguish it from other terms / years.
5. If you connect your LDAP / AD to Mahara and have your students and staff in separate directories, you can put all students in one Mahara institutions and all staff into another. The advantages are that you can give them separate themes, create initial portfolio pages for students only and different ones for staff that are put into the user's portfolio upon joining the respective institution, allowing public pages for all or just one user group etc.

Cheers

Kristina