15 December 2008, 12:44

I'd kinda hoped that Institutions would be able to have their own groups?

It might not be what Mahara is intended for but  was hoping to use it to encourage entrepreneurship and use the groups to represent 'networks' such as e-Learning or Animation or  Games Development and use "Institutions" to manage cross-network issues such as "Funding" or "Export issues".

We can do it all using the groups function as is but it's a better mapping to do it the othr way if it works.

 If not - what is the institutions part for? It seems like it's almost an informational tag? 

15 December 2008, 19:04

The main use of institutions is to segment users for the purpose of authentication and management. Groups are not associated with institutions - yet. We've talked about this internally before, and maybe in future the concept of "institution groups" will make its way into Mahara.

Most of the functionality for institutions is viewable in the admin section of Mahara. In general, the idea is that you can assign members of an institution to perform the day-to-day admin tasks for students in that institution, such as password resets. You can also configure how users in institutions get into the system - e.g. one institution's users might come in via SSO from an external application.