[Building Sakai] Promoting non-provided users to being provided

[Ray Davis]

The more complex reconciliation workflow you suggest is how we 
implemented SIS integration pre-Sakai. (I've mentioned it in the 
"Modifying derived memberships" section of 
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/GROUPS/Federated+Authorization+Use+Cases 
and at http://ray.media.berkeley.edu/blog/?p=43 .)

One promising aspect of "treating groups as first-class citizens" is 
that it might clear the conceptual ambiguity that we find in Sakai 2 
course sites: Does the site administrator want to "manage a 
manually-added member to the site" or to "add a student to the class 
roster"? It's impossible to be sure with the current UX. But if an 
instructor can go directly to "my class" (where academic roles don't 
have to map statically to application access rights) rather than having 
to create "a site" (where the two are conflated)...?

Best,
Ray

On 8/31/09 6:18 AM, Stephen Marquard wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We had a query today which was basically "I want to see which students in the course site are not registered for the course".
> 
> In the course in question, a number of students were added before the official registrations came through, so they started out non-provided, but subsequently became officially registered.
> 
> However, in Site Info, those users don't have the course code showing up in the 'Enrolled' column because they are non-provided users. If you delete them, they come back as provided users.
> 
> So currently there's no good way to answer the question.
> 
> It seems to me it might be useful to have non-provided users get promoted to provided users when the realm is updated, if their provided role is the same as their non-provided role.
> 
> This would carry the risk that a manually added student could find themselves dropped from the site if they registered for a course and then dropped it, but that seems more of an edge case compared to the more common query above.
> 
> Any views?
> 
> Regards
> Stephen
> 
> 
> 
> Stephen Marquard, Learning Technologies Co-ordinator
> Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town
> http://www.cet.uct.ac.za
> Email/IM/XMPP: stephen.marquard at uct.ac.za 
> Phone: +27-21-650-5037 Cell: +27-83-500-5290