19 July 2016, 20:38

Hi All,

I'm Lina from an international University. We are using Mahara as one of the most important e-learning platforms and we love Mahara a lot.

As the site admin, I found there are many groups and the number is growing quickly. Since the idea to have Mahara is accumulate e-portfolio every year, so we can't archive the data. The current way we are doing is to manually check the groups one by one and delete the obviously test or useless groups, which is really not efficient.

Could anyone advice a better way to manage the groups on Mahara?

Many thanks.

Best wishes,

Lina

19 July 2016, 21:50

Hi Lina,

These are just some ideas that I have:

1. Each group has a start / end date when setting up. Users can add an End date to each group.
2. Through the database, you can retrieve all groups that were created more than a year ago (for example). And, from the front-end, delete / archive them.

In Postgres, you would run this query to retrieve groups older than 1 year:

select * from "group" where ctime >  now() - interval '1 year';

I'm sure there are other ways too.

Cheers,

Ghada

20 July 2016, 14:24

Hi Ghada,

Thanks a lot for sharing your ideas. I've checked that not many groups are created with a start/end date in our Mahara. I will try to emphasize and encourage students and staff to set a start/end date.

Thanks again for your kind help.

Best wishes,

Lina

20 July 2016, 8:09

Hello Lina,

There is no easy way to delete empty or test groups as the title doesn't always include "test" and it's up to the group admins to take care of the management of their groups.

One way you could try is to use group categories and set up a category "Test". Then you'd be able to see all groups within that category easily. I think you'd still need to check them to see if they really are tests. ;-)

The use of categories may require a bit of educating / letting your users know. Categories can be changed at any time so a group set up as test group that evolves into a real group can change its category.

Also note that users of any group you delete will receive a group deletion notification.

Cheers

Kristina

20 July 2016, 14:30

Hello Kristina,

Thanks for your suggestion about the group category. I've discussed with my colleagues and we plan to set the group categories, such as "Academic Project Work 2016/17", and we will provide user guide to tell students and staff to put related groups into related category. We will also suggest users to set a start/end date.

I will let you know how's our practice going in the new semester.

Thanks.

Best wishes,

Lina