Add ability to remove ability of students to use portal chat from particular sites
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Jose Cebe June 29, 2018 at 7:15 AM
I have been working on this and this is what I've done:
Now is possible to disable the portal chat in a specific site
This feature will only appear if "portal.neochat" is active in sakai.properties file.
By default when creating a new site or updating an existing site (and portal.neochat=true in sakai properties), "Enable Portal Chat" will be checked.
When "Enable Portal Chat" is not checked, property portal.neochat=false is saved at site level.
This covers this JIRA, but I will create another one to add the ability to disable portal chat when the student starts an assessment.
Matthew Jones April 21, 2018 at 7:08 AM
Yeah, well I think the biggest issue here is that even if you're using something like lockdown browser, portal chat will still appear in that site/mode. Lockdown prevents you from using multiple tabs or navigating away from the delivery, but it will still render the contents that are in that tool.
Adrian Fish January 7, 2014 at 5:41 AMEdited
An important point: even if chat is disabled in a site, a user will still be able to move to their workspace and chat with their connections. A cleaner approach to this use case might be to apply a set of permissions for the duration of the test. While the test is under way, literally apply a set of global permissions, like turning off portal chat and profile2. This implies that a new realm is needed, a global one that can be used to control non site specific functionality. Currently we have portal chat, but down that line we may break profile2 functions out into flyouts that are accessible outside of my workspace; there will be more need for global rules at that point.
Adrian Fish January 3, 2014 at 8:53 AM
The safest (and easiest) thing to do would be just not render any of the chat markup as if portal.neochat=false was specified, but on a site by site basis. This could be done by a permission in the realm, as Chuck suggests. Initially this would be okay, but down the line I'd want to expose the permission in site admin or something. Realm editing is a bit of a pain. Or, we could have a tool on the left which was literally just a site specific permissions editor for the portal chat.
Mark Breuker March 22, 2013 at 4:40 AM
If you are doing an online timed test wouldn't you want to do that in a controlled (locked down) separate Sakai environment? I can imagine that users would be able to find others ways of communicating / cheating besides Sakai CLE.
I can imagine cases though where some instructors or departments would like to enable chat and others would not.
My preference would be to use the permissions structure for this.
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Jose CebeJose CebeReporter
Keli AmannKeli AmannLabels
Details
Details
Priority
CriticalFix versions
Components
Assignee
Jose CebeReporter
Keli Amann
Problem: If an instructor is doing a timed online test in the CLE, they may not want students to be able to easily chat with each other for this time if there is no valid reason to collaborate. It would be fine if this was in a chat room, because those comments are visible to the entire group and the instructor would know that they are cheating, but portal chat is private between individuals. Granted, if this test were taken from an unsecure computer, nothing stops students from chatting using other software, but with portal chat, even using a computer without any applications that also locks down the browser to only be able to go to Sakai would not be enough to prevent such collaboration
Proposed solution:
Give instructors, owners, and similar the ability to remove portal chat from particular sites so that students cannot chat with other classmates. I think this might be possible by providing an alternate skin, but this gets difficult to maintain (especially if your various departments have their own skin) and would be hard for instructors to find and use. So ideally, this option would actually show up for owners in the portal chat itself, possibly above "Show offline connections"
a) it would be nice if the option was "don't let students/participants chat with each other" such that students could still chat with instructors and other staff, and the staff could still chat with each other.
less appealing alternative is
b) add global "disable chat for this site" option, which would not let anyone talk with anyone while checked
If the option a is what we go with, students/participants would still see "Chat with students/participants disabled" next to "In this site"
If we go with option b, all members would see "Chat disabled " next to "In this site"
Also, they may still be able to chat with other classmates if Profile2 is enabled and they have a direct connection with them; if we wish to disable that, I think that needs to be made by a super user and is a separate JIRA issue.