20 August 2009, 19:02

Eventually users will leave an institute and the institute will no longer want to support their portfoilo.

It is possible to create an institute as an alumni and a user can change to this institute.

The  process that I have been looking at is to invite users to the alumni institute (Manage Institutions > Institution members> People who have not requested membership yet)

There  are a couple of problems with this - all users from all institutes are listed so it is hard to find the individual from your institute.

An individual can reject the invitation or may not see the invitation if they have email notifications turned off.

Is there another way to do this that is easier , if not then a feature request could be put in the following requirements

• similar to the current two column process but only listing one institution,
• an ability to include a message so people know whats going on 
• a possibilty to move a use r without acceptance of the invitation

I look forward to your ideas in this area.

20 August 2009, 22:41

Administrators can, when looking at the user edit screen for the particular user, already force-add or remove the user to/from an institution. Does this help? Would you suggest any changes to this mechanism (e.g. the ability to send a message), and would you still consider the mass-add/remove screen useful given the other screen?

20 August 2009, 23:54

Hi Nigel

I would think that there could be hundreds of students leaving an institution so searching for user and force add removing would be time consuming. Mass add/remove would help in this area.

 

The ability to send a message explaining the reason for moving and the options for the alumni student would be good as this there would be different options  avaialble for institutes on how they manage their alumni.

 

25 August 2009, 23:21

Righto - best to file a feature request (or WR if Flexible is keen to see this implemented quickly ).

20 August 2009, 23:09

The question of the graduates interests me as well, but in slightly different context, not technical. For example, as I know right now there is no clear mechanism how it should work at http://myportfolio.ac.nz/ Universities are paying for every student's account that is registered in the institution, but no one knows what happens when students graduate.

As I see there are several possible solutions. If students graduated from their university they could pay then to the university to provide ePortfolio service. Second option is export. Graduates may want to take their ePortfolios with them to the next university or new workplace systems.

Craig, your solution of creating alumni institute can be quite a good decision of this. But can you imagine how many unused accounts will be there in several years? I'm not sure that graduates will continue to use service provided by their former university if it is not associated with their current occupation.

Just some thoughts.

21 August 2009, 0:02

Yes you are right there are several options - it would be probably up to the student on which one they would prefer. options could include transfer, export, delete, or archiving records without update facilities.

Monitoring of the alumni students could be done to see if students are active and depending on financial or other criteria the student portfolio could be archived or exported to another system.

 

21 August 2009, 5:57

Hello,

I pesonally support the idea of a Alummi institutions, as I think that, since students have spent time and effort in building their portfolios, they can be given the choice of deciding if they want their work still to be hosted in the institution or not.

The terms and conditions of this Alummi agreement may vary from country to country, and from educational model (education as a business or education as  Enlightenment?). In terms of administration, if the agreement is clear among the student and the institution, I don't see that it is going to cause much extra workload for administrators .

However, since Mahara will allow users to export their work as a zip file, they can always backup their work when they finish. The problem may arise if they move to another institution that does not support the LEAP2A standard. 

Regards