ENTR:Main Scenario ENTR:Extensions ENTR:Notes ENTR:References ENTR:Associated Modules ENTR:Implementations ENTR:Advice and ExperienceENTR:Contributors

Goal: Automatically populate a given course with a list of persons externally defined as members.
Version: pre-implementation state, aimed at Sakai version 2.0 and later
DG Priority: HIGH
Status: IMPLEMENTING
Scope:
Preconditions: Users identified by LDAP or other UserDirectoryProvider service (external user). A suitable gateway to present the joined sites (default: the tabbed site setup in Sakai, but Roskilde University is going to use Portalino as the main gateway.
Success end: A given course is shown to a member of the course, with a corresponding role attached to the membership. A list of other users is available for all with adequate permissions in Site Info.
Failed end: If after some grace period, no site is available even though the student has correctly enlisted the course. In a synchronized solution some latency is expected.
Actors: The course registrar (external,system), the member of the course(person), the course system (internal, system)
Primary Actor: The member of the course
Trigger: login to Sakai
Security Concerns: If the membership is withdrawn while the student is actively using the site. Some latency is expected in a synchronized setting.
Logging: The appropriate logging should appear in the IMS Enterprise part of Sakai.
Performance Concerns: Dependencies on external system are a prime concern for many. Long timeouts can severily hamper navigation for a user. Since frequent synchronization basically is equivalent to caching, the Course Provider will act like a cached application.

At Roskilde University we would like to have the course automatically populated at runtime in the following scenario. A more unambitious scenario is listed at the end.

When a course membership list is created in the registrar (eg. at Roskilde University, we got a Group-Role management system Group Role Management System interacting with out User Directory), the courses-to-be is presented to the responsible tutor through a gateway (we will use our custom light-weight portal Portalino . At first access (click on course link), the Tutor - in the maintain role - instantiates a course site with a small subset of features. This should preferably be based on a template model cloning pre-created generic sites based on some metadata annotating the course type in our course management system. After the tutor has published his/her site, a link in the gateway should appear for the students.

An easier model will be synchronization of all courses daily (or more) to populate the import tables for Sakai. In this model, the Group Role Management System is accessed on an infrequent (default daily) basis to populate new groups in Sakai with IMS Enterprise data. This is probably the most realistic way to go (but the nicest alternative deserved to be described).