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Submitted by cbenoit on Wed, 09/03/2008 - 02:46.

Hello,

To use Mahara in a dynamic accompaniment of portfolios, my school would like to make visible to the tutor all views created by its students and not only the ones that are submitted to their approval. The validation phase would be preserved, our tutors want to support our students during the conception of their views but these views should not be accessible to others at this time of conception.

What do you think? Where is the code for access rights to views?
Is it possible to install Mahara on a system MAC OS? I saw it can't be installed on windows.

Sorry for my poor english.
Thank you,
Céline

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Hi :) Before making a chance

Submitted by nigel on Wed, 09/03/2008 - 13:40.

Hi :)

Before making a chance like this, you might want to examine if you can't make it work within how Mahara works currently. For example, you could train your students to give their tutors access to the View, if they want help and the tutors are unable to look at the View with the student at their computer.

The only reason I suggest there are quite a few places in Mahara (and in information online) that all tell users that Views are their own private Views unless they make them available to others. You would have to be extra sure to explain to users who could see their Views by default.

Furthermore, the knowledge that tutors can see their Views might discourage them from making their own personal Views, or Views they intend just for friends to see.

But if you think that you still want tutors to see the views, have a look at the code of the can_view_view function in lib/mahara.php. This is the function that decides whether a user can see a given View, and also helps in deciding if users can see other users' artefacts.

Regarding Mac OS - we don't "discourage" it, but at the same time, we don't test for it at the moment either. Some people have had luck and others have not, and it seems to vary based on whether ou're using Leopard or Tiger. This bug report has some information: https://eduforge.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1891&group_id=176...

Hope this helps you. Your English is fine :)

This request is linked to a return of experience

Submitted by cbenoit on Fri, 09/05/2008 - 04:23.

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.
I forgot to specify that our tutors have used Mahara during the previous school year in its current version. Following this experiment, they are asking us today a technical means to enable them better monitoring of their students. With the current version, they found that their support was fragmented and partial. They must wait for students seeking to validate them.

So I will implement the code allowing tutors to see the views of students from their inception.
I can include in the menu administrator a parameter for Mahara mode "normal" and Mahara mode "coaching".
In normal mode, users are unaccompanied and their data are completely closed.
In coaching mode, there are 2 levels of support according to the user, users would be accompanied when they submit their views or for the creation of their views.
Of course we will prevent students who are in the mode accompanied level strengthened their tutor has access to all their views

Would you be interested to integrate this code in Mahara thereafter?

Learner driven not tutor driven

Submitted by richard on Fri, 09/05/2008 - 14:56.

Hi,
One of the core principles of Mahara is that it is a user driven application with the User determining levels of access. At present Users can make their View public. You could have groups set up and have the User put their portfolio into that group. We are focused on making View set-up, management and reporting easier but we're not going to over-ride the principle that a User can create their own portfolios and then determine who sees it - like above, if everyone just made their View public then I'm not understanding the tutors requirements.

In summary, this feature is not planned for a core release.

regards
Richard Wyles

Ok for Learner driven not tutor driven - New idea

Submitted by cbenoit on Tue, 09/09/2008 - 00:36.

Hi,

We can add a parameter to check off by students (and not by the administrator) for those who wish to receive support strengthened. By checking this parameter students give access to all their views created to their tutors. They could remove this access anytime.

Regards,
Céline Benoit

Permissions Framework

Submitted by richard on Tue, 09/09/2008 - 13:10.

Hi,
Mahara's flexible permissions framework works through the User defining which Groups (or particular roles within a Group) have access to specific Views. Going forward, starting in the soon to be released 1.1, the Groups framework will get more sophisticated and powerful with Group types - one being closely aligned to a class. At this end we're still confused because the desire for a student to provide access to tutors already exists. You can add tutors from a Group - you are asking for site-wide tutors? Since we have Public, Logged in Users, & Friends then adding Tutors will be OK but the tutors may not relate to the students - we're assuming tutors in my institution?

regards
Richard