02 December 2015, 4:58

Hey everyone,

I've been reading through the posts in this forum trying to figure out an answer to my question, which is:

Can I as a Mahara user (staff) remove access to pages/collections that have been shared with me (by students and/or staff - others)?

I have found this to be a very short search with the final answer being no. Surely this cannot be so. I'm aware that we should and probably do ask our students once they have submitted their Mahara portfolio for assessment and received a grade to remove access to said page/collection afterwards. But what of those student who fail to remove our access to their portfolio? What about the student that leaves the institution after finishing their course, and forgets we still have access to their portfolio (as a link)?

We, those who have been given access to a portfolio, should have the choice whether we want to continue having access to a portfolio, and not rely on a others to remove access after the fact. If this option exists for administrators of Mahara at an institutional level, then this also shouldn't be just an option only for them, we need to have this option too. If we remove our access by mistake, we can always ask the student to give us access once again.

So my finishing question, will this be possible, has it already happened in Mahara 15 and I'm waiting for our University to install the latest version?

Thanks for listening folks.

Mark

02 December 2015, 8:44

Hello Mark,

Thank you for your post. The short answer is still "no" at his stage. Your idea is a great one and would be good to implement in Mahara for the reasons that you mention. However, we haven't been able to do so yet. If you want to tackle that or provide funding...

What we did do in the groups is an improvement already in Mahara 15.04 (the latest version is 15.10, released in October this year): If your students share their portfolios with a group, you can select whether to see the pages of everyone who shared their portfolio or just with active members of the group: http://manual.mahara.org/en/15.04/blocks/general.html#index-10

Thus, if you have the students in your group during the semester, they share their pages and you review them, and then you remove them from your group because the course is over, their portfolio may still be shared (unless they include an expiry date). With this new setting, you can decide to only show portfolios of current group members thus reducing the overall portfolios that are being displayed. Since you still see them under "Shared with me", they aren't completely lost.

While this does not solve the underlying wish of having more choice on "Shared with me", it may be a workaround until "Shared with me" can be improved.

Cheers

Kristina

02 December 2015, 13:29

To expand on what Kristina said, the functionality to hide non-members' shared pages from the group homepage, was this item: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1411004

I think at the time, we discussed the possibility of implementing a feature for users to manually "unshare" pages shared with them, or to hide them. But that turns out to be a somewhat difficult feature to implement, both in terms of determining the user interface for it, and the actual technical details on the back-end.
Like Kristina, though, I certainly think it's something we'd like to have if we could. But it's too much work for us to do it without specific funding for it, right now.Cheers,Aaron