22 July 2022, 22:18

Hello there,

I'm playing around with our Moodle and Mahara test systems and I am trying to connect both via LTI and webservices. My goal is to enable the moodle-assignsubmission_maharaws plugin.

Currently we are using Mahara over Moodle's MNET (without the old assignsubmission plugin) quite independently from each other. MNET is the only way to login to Mahara, we are not using any other authentication mechanism.

My questions now are:

• Is there any way to migrate existing Mahara-MNET-users from MNET authentication to LTI authentication?
• Using MNET we have a "login link" from the standard Moodle network block on our Moodle front page to Mahara. How could I replace this when migrating from MNET to LTI?

Thanks in advance and best regards

Sven

02 August 2022, 10:02

Hi Sven,

I gave the MNet to LTI migration a go and can report the following for your scenario:

1. In Mahara, set up LTI 1.1 in the same institution and configure it:
   1. Since you want to use the Mahara assignment submission plugin, web services addition, use the option 'Moodle Assignment Submission' where you select the external tool option. It includes the basic LTI 1.1 launch web service.
   2. It is best to have a specific account that can act as 'Service owner' rather than leaving your admin account in there. That's the avoid you being logged out every time someone is logging in. If you set up the service for an institution, that account only needs institution admin permissions as it does need to be able to create accounts.
   3. I would also configure it so that you auto-create new accounts. If you don't use SAML or LDAP or also want to allow your students and staff to log in via internal auth, ignore the parent auth option. MNet is not displayed in there.
2. In Moodle, set up your LTI tool. If you connect to only one Mahara institution, you can set it up on the site admin level via 'Manage tools' rather than needing to do that in each course.
3. In Moodle, configure the Mahara assignment submission plugin, web services edition. You can configure it for global use, if you only have one connection into your Mahara site in Site admin → Plugins → Assignment → Submission plugins → Mahara submissions.
4. Add an 'External tool' activity to a course and select the LTI tool. Make sure to not select to accept grades in the 'Privacy' section. That allows the link to function just as login link.
5. Now log into Mahara with an account that had previously jumped over via MNet. The person will end up in the same account  → double check it to make sure. ;-)
6. Next time they use the MNet link they are also sent to their correct account in Mahara and can thus use either. I would only suggest this though for a transition period. Since you are not using the Mahara assignment submission plugin for MNet, you could make a transition for everyone and even remove the MNet authentication in Mahara. You would need to delete all rows pertaining to that auth method though from the table 'auth_remote_user' or switch all your accounts over to the web services auth through the interface in bulk.
7. When you as admin log into Mahara and go to the settings page for an account, you will see that the authentication method on screen is displayed as 'Web services'. However, MNet login still works because that auth method is still stored in the database in the 'auth_remote_user' table (unless you removed that in step 6).

As always, give this a go on a testing site first. If you don't have one, give it a go with a couple of accounts on your production site first before you change things for everyone.

Cheers

Kristina