23 April 2014, 19:38

Hi again

I apologise for my flurry of questions.  I have tried searching previous forum posts but am not finding answers, or ones that match the version we are using.

Is it possible to turn on self-registration for just one institution? 

I am looking for ways that we can give our current students access to their eportfolios when they are no longer students and and do not have access to their email account.  Students are in a current students institution which is LDPd and integrated with Moodle so to give them continued access to their eportfolio we would need to move then to another institution where they can enter a personal email address.  We have no way of knowing when a student has completed all of their studies or when their email account will expire.  I am thinking that if we can turn on self-registration for a second institution, in an effect an alumini, then students could be instructed to export from current, self-register into the alumini institution (with a personal email address) and then import immediately after they have finalised their studies and before their email account has expired.  Would that work?

If it could work, would it also be possible to set a account lifetime for users in that institution?  Say for instance that we are only permitted to offer completed students with an additional year of access?

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Regards

Jen

23 April 2014, 23:54

I realised as soon as I posted my previous post, that my thinking was flawed:

• Students should need to export and import within the same installation, just to change institutions.

Would self-registration in another institution allow the student to provide a new email address, and for us to move the student from the current student institution to the alumni institution?

As you can see, I am going around and around an circles trying to come up with a process.

Another thought I have had is that we could provide instructions on the logged out home page directing students who have completed their studies to use the contact us link to request their institution be changed from the current students institution to the alumni institution with specific directions to ensure they provide a personal email address.

On receiving the notifications from the contact us field we could:

• change the institution 
• update the users email address with the new one they have provided.
• set a default membership period of one year.

It's a manual process requiring initiation by the student and action from the administrtors, but would that work?

I understand from Tobias' reply to my question about institution membership that at the end of the defaul period, in this case, one year, the students would receive a notification and if we received no further communciation from the student within the set time frame, their portfolio would be moved to "No Institution".   Currently the authentication in our "No institition"is via LDAP so the user would not be able to log in.  No problems there.  Would they also in the list of expired users?  

Once again, any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Jen

24 April 2014, 1:07

Hi Jennifer,

yes, it is possible to turn on self-registration for a single institution. You can do that on the edit-institution view. 

As far as I know, students can generally change their Email address - unless you lock this field in the institution settings. Note that locking a field for the No Institution institution disables it for the complete site. Not sure what happens when they are in two institutions from which one locks the field and the other not. 

I  don't have experience with all of those features but it might work like you suggested: When you create the student account, you put them into the LDPd-authenticated institution for enrolled students where they log in via Moodle. Then you create an institution open for self registration where the membership is restriced to like 365 days and the students can enroll themselves there and change their email-Adress before they loose their LDPd access. When they are removed from the first institution, they can request a password directly from the site and use Mahara from that self-enrolled institution until they are unregistered from there automatically. 

The students would most assurely not appear in the list of expired users though, because Mahara doesn't know if the LDAP-Access expires or if they just didn't enter the right passphrase. So they could log in again when someone registers them in an institution with another authentification method. Another thought: If you know how long their enrollment lasts and how long you want them to access the Eportfolio later on, you can add up the days and have the account expire within that time frame completey. They should then be removed from the institutions as well, from what I understand. 

You should give that a try, setting the default membership period to like 1 day - and tell us, if it works ^^

Best

Tobias

08 June 2014, 19:28

Hello Jennifer,

Sorry for the late reply.

As you corrected yourself already, if a student stays on the Mahara instance, there is no need for exporting and importing the portfolio but just for changing the authentication method and institution.

Students can provide a secondary email address already while they are connected to LDAP and Moodle. They can't make it the primary though if you have set up your Mahara so that content is updated from Moodle because then the email address would always be overwritten.

From the sounds of it because you don't know when a student finishes their studies, it would be best if you allowed your users to be members of multiple institutions (in "Site options" -> "Institution settings"). Then they can request membership of the alumni institution while they are still in your Moodle institution. You would need to accept them into that institution (you receive an email notification). Since they are still a member of the Moodle institution, their authentication method continues to be the one from their original institution until you remove them from there. Then the internal Mahara authentication kicks in if you have that for your Alumni institution. I still need to check what happens with the login - whether the students get send a username / password automatically or not. Ideally, they don't loose their email address immediately so that they can get their login details and then change their secondary email address.

Alternatively, you can change user details in bulk via the user CSV upload in the administrative area.

Cheers

Kristina

18 June 2014, 14:03

Thanks Kristina.  Your response is very much appreciated.

Regards

jen