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Logically separate atutor instances



  • 2004-07-20 16:12:57

    Logically separate atutor instances

    I am trying to create logically separate instances of atutor (separate courses within an organization). Users within an organization should only see courses for that organization. I looked at ACollab but it appears to handle grouping within a course not courses within a group. My first thought was to dynamically set the DB_NAME in config.inc.php using a parameter passed when loading atutor and setting a session variable but once I'm logged into atutor the session variable is no longer available and the database reverts back to my default. Any ideas / thoughts / suggestions on what would be the best approach for this?


  • 2004-07-21 08:26:21

    Logically seperate?

    What do you mean by logically separate.

    Could you rephrase your post. It's not clear what you are trying to accomplish.

    Have you read through the Administrators section of ATutor HowTo?

    http://atutor.ca/atutor/demo/?cid=3406;g=2


  • 2004-07-21 10:15:36

    Logically separate

    I would like to be able to group students by company / entity and allow those students to view only the courses available for that company / entity. My thought is that I could create a separate database for each company / entity and change the config.inc.php to dynamically load the database name instead of the static default. I have looked at the Administrators section and ACollab and neither appeared to address a situation such as this. I tried to modify the config.inc.php to push the database name into a session variable but after the login it is no longer set. With you knowledge of the system, does my approach seem viable or would you approach this differently?
    Thank you very much for your response.


  • 2004-07-21 10:36:56

    Logically separate

    I understand what you're trying to do, and an easy solution doesn't come to mind.

    If possible, I'd say just create two seperate installations of ATutor and ACollab, but then you would have two different member tables and would have to direct different members to a different installations/URL, which could be complicated. Not having ALL accounts in the same table could become a problem to your ogranization. Once ATutor has LDAP support then that wouldn't be an issue anymore, but that's not for some time yet.

    You could also make all the courses private and hidden, and only give access to the courses on a member by member basis (a lot more manual work assigning members to courses).

    You could also try using the Course Categories to group your courses, then adding a small peice of code that would depending on some session variable default to a different Category. (not sure which session variable you might use, you would have to add one, and possibly add a field in the database as well).

    .joel


  • 2004-07-23 12:07:26

    What we did

    At the university we are dealing with 1st to 4th year students with a total of some 7,000 students studying English in any given semester.

    We created five seperate installations of ATutor and ACollab, (ATutor and ACollab contain the master courses and are only used for development and change while ATutor 1 - 4 and ACollab 1 - 4) are used for each year groups' courses.

    The main Language Centre page has links for each year group which links to another page with their course links to ATutor.

    Incidentally there are quite a lot of courses in each semester - for example Year 1 students could be doing any of the three courses - Remedial English, English 1 or English 2. Yjere are 41 classes with about 30 students in each doing English 2 in Year 2 and the content in replicated from a backup of the master course to these 35 classes.

    This may seem comlex but it is not at all difficult. Only occassionally do students try to access a course that they are not enrolled in. Hope it makes sense.


  • 2004-07-23 20:39:45

    What we did

    Perry ,

    It sounds like you're using ATutor extensively. Perhaps if you give us more details and guest access to your installations we can work together to figure out a real solution, if you are in fact committed to using ATutor in your university environment.

    .joel


  • 2004-10-13 17:23:12

    What We Did

    Perry
    There is a message addressed to you in the Community Discussions forum, where I reposted your well written description of your experiences with ATutor.

    http://www.atutor.ca/view/16/2609/1.html

    [reply][b]In reply to:[/b]
    Dear Joel:

    I am sorry that it has taken so long to get back to you but things have been rather hectic here.

    First let me give you a brief description of the system:

    Server: HP ML 300
    CPU: 3....
    [op]forums/view.php?fid=7;pid=2106;page=1#2412[/op][/reply]