11 April 2013, 1:44

Hi,

I'm relatively new to Mahara, and I hope this is the right place to ask this question.

We have a fresh installation of Mahara, with a few institutions in it. All users are authenticated with shibboleth, and based on their attributes automatically assigned to an institution.

Since the users do not have to request membership to an institution they might not be aware of their membership status. Therefore, I'd like to provide specific information on a insitutional homepage. Now there's a site homepage and a group homepage, but I can't find something like an institutional hompage.

Am I missing something?

thanks and best regards

Rolf

11 April 2013, 11:14

Hi Rolf,

Welcome aboard!

I don't think Institutions have a homepage that is quite the same as the group homepage. The closest is the user's Institution Membership page, but that's pretty bare -- it just tells you what institution you're in.

There are Institution Pages, which are Pages that get copied into a user's portfolio when they join an institution. So, you could use one of those to share the information. Or you could create a Group for each Institution, and use that.

Cheers,
Aaron

11 April 2013, 20:26

Thanks for your answer Aaron,

A particular institution page or an institution-group could be a solution. It would however be important that users finds institution-specific information very easy, preferrably without additional mouse click. Is this doable with an institution page or a group?

Most of our users a pure beginners with Mahara, and I doubt that they find that instiution-information-page.

cheers

Rolf

11 April 2013, 18:31

Hello Rolf,

In Mahara I see institutions as a way of separating administratively Mahara users, regarding the way they are authenticated or the place they jump from and to Mahara (one Moodle server or another).

Institutions are not "water-right", although a project at LUNS (UK) exists with "wall garden" institution, and there are also in Mahara some preferences to hide users from other instiutions to the others, when a search for users is made.

In Mahara all the work is done in the personal environment (files, journal, pages) and moreover in groups.

When you create a new group you can say in its preferences that every new user becomes automatically a user of this group. You could name this group "Welcome Group" and put all the information you would like to be accessible to new users.

HTH

-dajan

11 April 2013, 20:38

Hi dajan,

Thanks for your hint - and the explanation of the nature of instiutions om Mahara. I think I understand the rationale that institutions don't play an important role in the e-portfolio concept. E-portfolios are user-centric, and not institution-centic. I agree with that.

However, there is some important administrative information that we have to transmit to all users (at least) the first time they log in to the system.

I'll have a closer look at that welcome group and see, if this is a solution for our problem.

Thank you for you help and best regards

Rolf

11 April 2013, 22:14

Hello Rolf,

Since you have multiple institutions set up, you could not use the auto-add users feature for groups which is only available on the site level. Though making that available for institutions would be great so you can set up groups for institutions that users join automatically when they enter that institution. You could use such groups then for communication of news, guidelines etc.

Do I assume correctly that users will only get an account the first time they log in? Or are all accounts created at the same time? If the latter were the case, you could set up a group for each institution via a CSV file and then add all institution members via a CSV file to their respective groups. See http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.6/administration/groups.html#add-and-update-groups-by-csv However, this doesn't work if the accounts are created whenever a student logs in for the first time.

There is the web services plug-in https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Plugins/Artefact/WebServices which can create and also populate groups. Maybe this can hooked up to your system and adapted to work with it so you can pull the correct information and create groups as well as place group members.

Cheers

Kristina

11 April 2013, 23:40

Hello Kristina,

I read your answer and I then have a question. If Rolf creates a new group after having logged-in as site administrator, he can use the auto-add users feature. Then all new users will become members of this group regardless the institution they have landed.

Am I wrong?

Cheers,

-dajan

12 April 2013, 14:30

Hello dajan and Rolf,

I understood the requirement the following way: Users from one institution should only see institution-specific information on an "institution homepage" which I interpreted as "institution group" which would be semi possible. Users should not all be in one group for all institutions because then members from all institutions get information about all institutions and have institution information overload.

Currently, we can only auto-add users to a group on the site level, i.e. all users would be in one group instead of being in their institution group.

Please correct me if I am wrong in my understanding of the requirement, Rolf.

Cheers

Kristina

12 April 2013, 0:39

Hi Kristina,

> Do I assume correctly that users will only get an account the first time they log in?

Yes that's correct. Whenever a user logs in with Shibboleth for the first time an account is created on the fly. So importing the accounts and group membership via CSV is not an option here.

I'll try to figure out what to do ... and I'll let you know :-)

Thank you very much for your help!

Rolf

12 April 2013, 14:35

Hello Rolf,

Mhh. There is the LDAP sync plug-in that allows for prior creation of accunts and also groups. However, that wouldn't work with Shibboleth, but maybe something similar could be written? As far as I know, only MNet can have a parent authority and thus bind 2 authentication method in one account and thus allow two ways of authenticating a user.

That means, when we want to allow users to log in via SAML SSO / LDAP etc. AND Moodle, they can do so.

But maybe if you have all users in one directory, you could use the web services API and alter it to work with your directory / to make the right calls.

Cheers

Kristina