11 January 2025, 1:41

Hi community,

Is there any easy way to provision users (e.g. from Moodle) to Mahara, based on one or more profile fields in such a fashion that a student with a profile field 'Academy = Law School' is provisioned to the Mahara institution 'Law School'? Would separate LTI instances for each institution be the only viable way to get this done, or are there other routes to explore like API interfaces?

13 January 2025, 8:30

Hi Joost,

There is a way to do this in SAML authentication where an 'affiliation' value can be passed in from the Identity Provider so that all people can use the same provider / authentication instance but are placed into different Mahara institutions based on their 'affiliation' value.

There is not a way to do this via LTI currently so having an LTI authentication instance per Mahara institution is the way to go.

Cheers

Robert

23 January 2025, 14:36

Hi Joost,

Another possibility is to create web services connections if you wanted to provision accounts ahead of students actually logging in. If your students should always only be in one institution rather than a common one AND their faculty institution, then you would best set up separate LTI connections and use those in the relevant courses rather than having a common LTI link. If you only want to have one LTI connection, then students would need to be able to join multiple institutions so that you can set up one institution for everyone, which is hooked up with LTI, and then have a web service also put them into the other institution based on their faculty.

Authentication methods are only valid for one institution and can't be shared mongst institutions unless you customise Mahara to allow for that.

Cheers

Kristina

24 January 2025, 4:04

Hi Kristina,

Thank you for your clear answer :). That would mean we'd have to go back to the drawing board. Currently, we don't have a parameter defining 'Academy' in our Identity and Access Management, so there really isn't a way to get that info through web services (yet).

Also, students should be able to be a member of the general institution, and at least one other institution (aligned with the programme / programmes they are enrolled in).

For now, we can at least try to have them apply for institution membership from their profile pages in Mahara (which isn't perfect either).

24 January 2025, 12:00

Hi Joost,

That sounds like the only option then for right now without any changes to Mahara or your IdP.

Why do you want your students in separate institutions?

• Do you want to roll out templates automatically based on institution membership?
• Do you want to give admins at the different faculties more autonomy in managing their account holders?
• Do you want to customise any messages seen on the dashboard?

I'd like to know more to see if separate institutions are the way to go or if you could handle things via groups, for example.

Thank you

Kristina