12 May 2009, 17:36

I can see the benefit of making institution wide resources available by creating views.

How do administrators give access to the view to only institute members?

Under Edit View access the choices of groups and users but not institute.

There is an option sometimes to Copy for new institution members but this doesn't include existing members.

Does access for institute members just happen automatically when an institute view is created ?

12 May 2009, 19:00

Hi Craig,

From what I remember the institution views are only really useful for copying.  We currently don't have view access permissions at the level of institutions.

As well as the "Copy for new members" setting I think institution views are also used on the "Copy a view" screen, where there is some filtering of the list of views available by institution.

13 May 2009, 3:17

Hi! I was just thinking about that option (institution's view acessible only to its members).

Maybe it's an interesting feature to request for.

21 May 2009, 17:06

I was hoping to see if there was much support for this idea before including as a feature request.

If there is then there may be a possibility to up the priority or fund this.

The type of information that could go on an institution view would be

• exemplar material for other institutes
• general info on copyright, ethics
• templates for students work
• other generic infromation for the use of eportfolios or institute info

22 May 2009, 4:00

Hello,

 I think that the feature you are talking about-institution's views only available to its members- is already implemented in controlled- membership groups.

 The main argument here is that the concepts of  "institution" and "group" are very much flexible in Mahara, and I know, for my own experience, that the possible success or failure of adopting Mahara as a eportfolio platform, depends very much on how smartly you are able to map your community of users into institutions and groups.

For example, originally we decided to map our users into six institutions-corresponding to our six acacemic schools- and within these six institutions, we decided to create controlled membership groups for academic programs. (However, I had to change latter these original six institutions into 3 because of the way Mahara authenticates users, but this is a different discussion).

Since we had mapped our staff and learners into controlled membership groups, we use the group view facility to provide the information  you mentioned in your last post, Graig, but not so much about copyright issues and generic information about eportfolios (this can be explained in the home page, for instance, but about  templates for submitting assignments, information about the programme of studies etc.

 It would be interested to know how do you define "an institution" for your college.

Regards

Aaricia/Mari

02 June 2009, 23:16

Hi 

Thanks for your suggestion.

We have defined an Institute as a entire college, as we are hosting over 150 schools and universities on the server.

Some of the institues have several hundred members - I think this wouldn't be suitable for controlled membership as you would have to add/remove users  frequently . Controlled membership is more for course or subject area level.

Views are definable at an institute level  so I was wanting to give access to these view at an institute level - which doesn't seem to be an option at this stage.

I think using the controlled groups would work for the  institutes with lower numbers though.

03 June 2009, 17:47

Yeah, not being able to give access to institutes for instiitution views is a bit of an oversight on our part, and is something we should fix one day.

One nice solution might be if Mahara automatically created a controlled group for every institution and managed membership of that group automatically. I don't think it's a replacement solution for this problem, but still having a group for each institution seems like a nice idea.. the institution admins could be the group admins and institution staff could be moderators for example.. anyone else think this is a good idea?

04 June 2009, 5:06

04 June 2009, 17:01

I guess there could be some potential for confusion there. But then institutions aren't browseable in the same way that users and groups are, which helps.

For the record, the main purpose of institutions is really for user management/theming/devolved administration. Groups are much more fluid than this, as users can create or destroy them at any time, and group membership will change constantly of course.

Personally, I think the first thing to do is to allow institutions to treat the graphics of its Home Page visible to their members (insert your logo, description, etc..) so that it can be a strong reference.

Institutions can provide an institution theme already - is that what you meant?

05 June 2009, 4:09