09 October 2014, 5:47

Hello All,

We are moving from a hosted to a more complex institutional installation... and I have a steep learning curve ahead of me!

My prime concern is to be able to set up Mahara for two different programs with, if possible, one installation, shared resource libraries, common access to both instances for teacher ID's and -crucially- no contact whatsoever possible between students on the other program (!).

If anyone could point me in the direction of any resources that might help, I'll promise I'll be more measured in my cries for help once I get into it.

Thank you in advance

Mark

09 October 2014, 11:50

Hi Mark,

Unfortunately what you're describing is not possible in a standard Mahara install. It was discussed earlier on in the Mahara roadmap as a possible thing to implement, but it never got off the ground. If you google "walled garden mahara" you should be able to find plenty of discussions about the idea, and I think there is a Mahara 1.2 branch that partially implemented it. There are also some notes here on the wiki: https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Developer_Area/Specifications_in_Development/Isolated_Institutions

Since this didn't get upstreamed, the workaround is to just run separate Mahara installs. If teachers need access to both, then you can use an external authentication source like LDAP, or a single-sign on setup like MNet or SAML, to make it easier for them to navigate between both sites. The downside is that if a teacher wants to use the same portfolio content in both sites, they'll have to copy it from one to the other via Leap2a export & import.

Cheers,

Aaron

09 October 2014, 15:50

Thank you Aaron, I feared as much!

I don't think ours is a unique use case, so this may gain some support subsequently, if only because of compliance issues. Thank you in particular for the Leap2a tip.

All the best,

Mark