Instructors should be able to assign site-specific aliases to users

Description

Currently, a user has one ID, one email address, one name, and so on across all sites within a Sakai installation. There should be a way to set site-specific user data which will be displayed instead of the defaults in the context of a given site. In particular, course-site-specific aliases should be able to override a student's user ID.

Use Cases:

  • In a Trade Bargaining course, students are assigned country names. For the duration of the course they represent that country in all activities within the course, including voting, chatting, and discussions. In the equivalent course site, students are identified by country name aliases in all tools.

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Original description:

We have a Trade Bargaining course where students are assigned country names and for the duration of the course they represent that country in all activities within the course.
For the last few years they've been using an online environment to do their bargaining, voting, chatting and discussions. Having access to an online environment has become essential to the course and they won't be able to use Sakai without this feature.
The alias should be course specific.
Also the students don't choose their alias, it is assigned to them

Environment

None

Test Plan

None

Activity

David Horwitz January 21, 2010 at 12:32 AM

See the UserAlias project in contrib

Stephen Marquard September 16, 2007 at 2:24 AM

Needs a set of changes in user & some tools after 2.5.0 has been released.

David Horwitz July 24, 2007 at 2:44 AM

A tool to allow instructors to add the aliases is evovling at: http://source.cet.uct.ac.za/svn/sakai/user-alias/trunk/

Work on implementing the changes to user is being discussed under https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/browse/SAK-10418#icft=SAK-10418

Stephen Marquard July 24, 2007 at 1:35 AM

UCT is working on an implementation of this.

The implement will require an API change in the user project which we hope to have incorporated for 2.5. This will enable the use of a contrib tool/service to manage and resolve user aliases within a site.

The aliases work for tools that use getDisplayName, including Announcements, Chat, Forums, Wiki, Resources.

Greg Doyle February 27, 2006 at 1:34 AM

To the question (in the Gradebook to give a student a final grade, should the instructor see the student's ID, or the country name alias, or both?)

ideally both, which is what we''ve been used to. In fact in all tools where the student id and name appears, the student id and alias should.

Fixed

Assignee

Reporter

Priority

Created February 7, 2006 at 9:48 AM
Updated March 27, 2012 at 7:01 AM
Resolved January 21, 2010 at 12:32 AM