08 October 2021, 1:49

Our school year has started, this year we are piloting Mahara for several educational tracks.

Our students have logged in to Mahara. They are 'enrolled' in the correct institution. Our teachers want to create templates for the students to work on.

However, we just found out that you can not push templates to students. There's an auto-copy function of templates, but:

1. In doesn't work on pages but only on collections
2. It only seems to work with one collection (?)
3. It only copies pages to new accounts in the institution

Especially the last point surprises me. Why only the new students? Do I now need to remove all the students from their institution, add the template, re-enroll them in the institution? That seems kinda illogical.

What if we want to add some new templates later this year? I did notice the 'create, copy' option, but that would require all students to make this action individually in stead of helping them out with one 'push' of correct templates.

Is this feature just not developed yet?

11 October 2021, 15:56

Hi Richard,

There are a few things in here. You can set any portfolio page or collection as template and then allow it to be copied into accounts for new institution members. That is not restricted to collections. What is restricted is the 'Current auto-copied template'. That feature is a convenience more than anything as it changes the permissions as well. You can still set other templates or even non-templates to auto-copy.

This convenience feature is currently only available for collections as it as work done for a client and they are only working with collections. Therefore, this feature, like many others in Mahara, was implemented as phase 1 and can be taken to phase 2 by other institutions who may also wish to have it available on individual pages or for more than one collection. What this feature allows you do to is connect it to web services and give that portfolio to people based on certain rules, for example, including to all existing institution members if the rules require that.

In general, templates are not rolled out to existing institution members as they may already work with the template, need to use an older version or for another reason. They would be inundated with new templates that might be completely irrelevant to them. Institutions are often also so large that a general roll-out may not be advisable.

You can give new templates to everyone though if you use groups and set a portfolio to be copied into the accounts of existing group members.

Thank you

Kristina

13 October 2021, 3:45

Hi Kristina!

Thanks for your reply!

Is there a good webservice documentation available (like Moodle?) A link would be nice :)

Can you advise us when to use groups and when to use institutions. Right now we have created an institution for every educational track. I don't know if this is wise. Perhaps we should create a group for every individual track.

A track is usually followed by around 40-50 students. We thought separate institutions were needed, but this might not be the case.

13 October 2021, 11:24

Hi Richard,

There is some old documentation on the wiki for when web services were a plugin. I believe the infrastructure hasn't changed much when it got into Mahara core, and you'll see a lot of similarities to Moodle, which should make it easier to understand. A couple of pointers (just ignore bits about installing the plugin as it's in core):

• Web services
• Web services plugin

Institution vs. group is a good question. Generally, I say, go with an institution if you want:

• some other person than the administrator for your 'normal' institution to manage the accounts, e.g. alumni
• set a different theme
• set different rules re account quota, use of certain functionalities like SmartEvidence, portfolio completion, public pages etc.
• allow different authentication methods. You can have multiple auth methods in a single institution though as well.

If it is just to group people, then a group maybe be fully sufficient so that you don't need to put students into different institutions all the time or end up with them being in multiple institutions. Also, if you are connecting to Moodle and want everyone to use the same LTI link, they need to be in the same institution.

Cheers

Kristina

28 October 2021, 3:14

Thanks again Kristina!

We have set up multiple institutions and students can become member of multiple institutions as well.

I don't know yet if this is the correct way to go, but I guess we will find out.

We will be wanting to add users to institutions using webservices and minimizing administrative tasks.