[LON-CAPA-admin] Re: Changing student ids

[Stuart Peter Raeburn]

Hi Todd, 

At the Domain Level, the "CUSR" function allows the Domain Coordinator to 
modify a user's last name, first name, middle name and generation and also 
to add or expire roles.  Support for changing a studentID via "CUSR" is not 
supported in either v.1.0.2 or v.1.0.99. 

A studentID can be changed within the context of a course, however, by 
selecting the "Course Coordinator" role and using "ENRL" -> Modify student 
data, and then clicking on the username.  As this procedure would need to be 
carried out for one student at a time, you will want to use a different 
method for the 400 students with accounts in your domain. 

There does not appear to be a way presently via the DC web interface to 
obtain a listing of everyone with user accounts in your domain. Probably the 
simplest thing to do would be to access each of the courses in your domain, 
as a course coordinator, and use "ENRL" -> "View Class List" and choose "any 
enrollment status", and click on the "CSV format" link to display a comma 
separated list of students. You could then save this to your workstation 
filesystem, and either write a custom script to modify studentIDs in the CSV 
files, or import into Excel, and modify the studentIDs in the worksheets. 
Next you would upload the modified CSV files using "ENRL" -> "Upload a class 
list" into either the original LON-CAPA courses, or into a single newly 
created LON-CAPA course. 

One disadvantage of uploading into the original courses is that the start 
and end dates for all students would be set to the same value (whatever 
choice was included in the start and end date settings in the "Upload a 
class list screen") in each class (effectively overwriting any current 
choices).  You must also make sure that the "Disable ID/Student Number 
Safeguard and Force Change of Conflicting IDs (only do if you know what you 
are doing)" checkbox is checked, for the changed studentIDs to take affect. 
Another disadvantage is that you would need to carry out the "Upload a 
classlist" task in each course. 

If, instead, you create a "temporary" course, you could concatenate the 
class lists from all the courses in a single CSV file.  Once again you would 
need to ensure that the "Disable ID/Student Number Safeguard and Force 
Change of Conflicting IDs (only do if you know what you are doing)" checkbox 
is checked for the changed student IDs to take effect when uploading the 
cumulative class list file into the single "temporary" course.  You would 
want to set the end date for the students to be the same as the start date, 
so that the student role in the "temporary course" would never really be 
accessible to the students.  One impact of this second method is that 
students will have different studentIDs when class lists are displayed for  
their existing courses (where they were enrolled using the old studentID 
system) versus the class lists displayed for any future courses.  This 
discrepancy comes about because updating a class list with the "Disable 
ID/Student Number Safeguard and Force Change of Conflicting IDs" checkbox 
checked causes the following: 

(a) update of the studentID to the new value in the user's environment.db 
file in the user's directory in lonUsers, e.g.,  for user smith, in 
lonUsers/domain/s/m/i/smith
(b) update of the studentID in the classlist.db file in the course to which 
you are uploading a class list file but NOT in the classlist.db files for 
any OTHER courses in which the student is (or was) enrolled. 

This behavior, suggests that you have one other course of action, if 
persistence of old-style studentIDs in class lists for existing courses is 
not an issue.  You could simply leave the student IDs defined in the users' 
environment.db files to remain as they are now, but when adding new class 
lists via ENRL -> "Upload a class list", use the new style student IDs in  
the class list files.  The act of upload would cause the user's student ID 
to switch from the old to the new. 

If you intend to create a custom localenroll.pm file to support automated 
enrollment in your domain (to be available in v. 1.1), you will want to 
update the studentIDs in the users' environment.db files (e.g., by using the 
"temporary" course method outlined above), because automated enrollment is  
not carried out for any students with mismatched studentIDs (Although the 
process will log a message about inconsistency in studentIDs, if it 
encounters a mismatch between the studentID provided from your institutional 
data and the studentID in the system). 

Stuart 

Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group
Division of Science & Math Education,
Michigan State University, East Lansing MI USA 


Todd Ruskell writes: 

> Hi, 
> 
> For Fall 2003, our campus was still using SSN as primary identifier for
> students, so we have a bunch of users with SSN as their ID/Student
> Number in LON-CAPA.  Starting in Jan 2004, this is going away, and now
> we all have 8-digit campus ids as the primary identifier.  So, we need
> to make the change in LON-CAPA, too. 
> 
> In 1.0.99.2, when a Domain Coordinator does a "CUSR", there is no longer
> an option to view/change the ID/Student Number.
> I seem to remember being able to do this with 1.0.*  But, even if I
> could do this, I wouldn't want to.  I only have about 400 students in
> the system so far, but that's still too many to do by hand. 
> 
> So here's the 3 questions:  
> 1) How can I get a list of everyone on the system, and their
> corresponding current ID/Student Number? 
> 
> 2) Assuming I can use this list to get the new ID/Student Number, is
> there any way at all I can do a bulk update? 
> 
> 3) If I do a bulk update of ID/Student Numbers, what, if anything, is
> likely to break?  Note that we are going from 9-digit to 8-digit
> numbers, so duplication shouldn't be an issue. 
> 
> Thanks for you help, 
> 
> Todd 
> 
> -- 
> Dr. Todd Ruskell			
> Lecturer, Department of Physics		Office: Meyer Hall 326
> Colorado School of Mines		Phone: 303-384-2080
> 1523 Illinois Street			Fax: 303-273-3919
> Golden, CO 80401 
> 
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