14 August 2014, 20:08

Hi everyone

We are looking at setting up the governance rules around our site and have hit some questions. We were hoping others in the community had considered some of the same questions and might be able to provide some insight into how they handled them. The questions primarily focus around user account management.

Before I get to the questions, here is a brief overview of our institution and Mahara set up.
We are a large training provider in NSW (Aus) and have been using Mahara for a few years. Initial take up was slow but the usage of the site has grown significantly in the last six months. We currently have around 4000 users. Our Mahara site is set up with one Institution with three authentication methods; LDAP, XML-RPC (from our Moodle) and Internal. We are looking at setting up another Institution that will be for Alumni giving former staff and students the opportunity to continue to use their account and when we move them to this Institution we will change their authentication method to internal.

I am particularly interested in when people delete accounts from their Mahara site. I don’t want us to end up with a site that is full of content for staff/students who are no longer current and is just consuming space unnecessarily but we aren’t sure what the right time frame for removing these accounts is.

Here is some of the other discussion questions that have arisen out of our team discussions

• How do you manage user accounts when a student leaves the organisation?
• Do you allow students to continue to access the site? How long for?
• At what point do you delete accounts? Do you warn students/staff first?
• Do you use the suspend account functionality much?

One of the areas where we struggle to manage our accounts is with students finishing up and us not having any awareness/visibility of this.

If anyone has any comments about any of these questions they would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
Anita

31 August 2014, 15:20

Hello Anita,

Congrats on having more users on your site and seeing it used. What changed in the implementation? If you are going to the EPortfolio Forum in Melbourne, I'd love to have a chat with you about that in person.

As for your questions: They are all tricky ones as there is no simple right or wrong answer. It is always "It depends".

In the organizations that we support, I've seen several scenarios happening for when a user leaves:

• Account is kept indefinitely and users can continue to log in
• Account is kept indefinitely, but users cannot log in anymore since they are disconnected from Moodle or LDAP or single sign-on
• Account is kept for 3-6 months and then deleted silently
• Account is kept for 3-6 months and then suspended, but essentially kept
• Account is kept and moved to an alumni institution on the same Mahara site that might have some slightly different settings, e.g. less storage space, a different theme etc.

If you wish to delete accounts of students once they have left, I'd recommend that you let them know clearly well before they lose access, maybe even send them a second email message because some will come back a couple of years after they lost access and want to have their portfolio back. I'd recommend they make an HTML and a Leap2A export. The former allows them to view their portfolio and files more easily whereas the latter enables them to import it back into a Mahara instance in the future.

Some institutions opt to keep their graduates close and allow them to use their Mahara site as alumni. That way, the students can use their portfolio easily to apply for jobs and you still have access to them, e.g. via group discussions, can keep them updated about the goings on on campus etc. instead of having to join their networks all over the internet (you may have to do that at some stage anyway, but at least your Mahara site could be the dissemination for official alumni news in a group open to all alumni).

Since Mahara allows for numerous authentication methods, you could change the authentication from your Moodle one to the internal one and then also encourage them to change their email address unless they can keep their university one.

To make a long story short: There is no magic bullet, and it depends on what server resources you have at your disposal to keep portfolios, whether you wish to set up an alumni network on your site to stay in touch with the alumni easily and keep them engaged, or whether you want to severe the ties quickly.

Cheers

Kristina