[LON-CAPA-admin] XML Course Creation and Clone Permissions

[Stuart Raeburn]

Joyce,

>
> We are currently creating/cloning courses via the Course Attribute  XML file.
>

When a Domain Coordinator uses "Create courses/communities by  
uploading an attributes file", to create course(s) from an XML file  
containing course definitions, cloning of an existing course is  
automatically allowed for any  course in the same domain.

In this context the "Users allowed to clone course" setting for an  
individual course, which may have been set by a Course Coordinator  
either via:

(a) Settings > Course Settings > Display ("General course settings" checked),

or

(b) The Course Initialization "helper" the first time the course was accessed,

is simply ignored, and the Domain Coordinator has unrestricted rights  
to clone any course (as long as it is within the same domain).

>
> In our domain, we don't really need to protect cloning rights and it  
> would be nice if we could make "any user" a default.
>

There is a domain configuration:
"People who may clone a course (besides course's owner and coordinators)"

which can be set to one of:

(a) "No additional course requesters"
(b) "Any course requester in course's domain"
(c) "Course requests for official courses ..."
where institutional codes for new and cloned course have identical:
Semester, Year, Department, Number (as many checked as needed)

Note: (c) is only available as an option if the &instcode_defaults()  
routine in /home/httpd/lib/perl/localenroll.pm has been customized.  
See: section 4.7 "Search Filters for Official Course Categories" in  
the PDF version of the Domain Coordination manual (p. 61).

The domain configuration for Course/Community defaults can be set via:
Main Menu > Set domain configuration > Display ("Course/Community  
defaults" checked).

The domain default set there is currently used when checking cloning  
rights for courses, where no specific setting has been made by the  
course owner.

The exceptions (one noted above) are where a Domain Coordinator uses  
the web GUI to create a course using either (a) "Create a single  
course" or (b) "Create courses/communities by uploading an attributes  
file".

Note: the domain default is only consulted if there is no setting for  
who may clone a course in the course's settings.

When using LON-CAPA's "Request course" web form, the requester can  
always clone courses he/she owns, or in which he/she has active Course  
Coordinator roles,  but see my earlier post to the lon-capa-users list:

http://mail.lon-capa.org/pipermail/lon-capa-users/2016-January/005035.html

for information about a patch for 2.11.1 required to support that.


Stuart Raeburn
LON-CAPA Academic Consortium

Quoting "Young, Joyce E" <young257 at purdue.edu>:

> We are currently creating/cloning courses via the Course Attribute   
> XML file. We'd like to create new courses with the "General Course   
> Settings" option of Users Allowed to Clone Course = Any User in   
> (our) Domain. Is it possible to set this from within the XML   
> attribute file, and if so, how should it be listed?
>                 We're working towards implementing the Auto-Course   
> Create setting (Create pending official courses from XML files) and   
> are looking to thwart the error message of "The new course could not  
>  be cloned from the existing course because the new course owner  
> does  not have cloning rights in the existing course." In our  
> domain, we  don't really need to protect cloning rights and it would  
> be nice if  we could make "any user" a default.
>                                                                 Thanks,
>                                                                       
>             Joyce
>
> Joyce Young
> Programmer/Analyst
> ITAS - Student Systems Competency Center
> Purdue University
> 3495 Kent Avenue, Suite 100
> West Lafayette, IN 47906
> Phone: (765) 427-6340
> Fax: (765) 464-2233
> Campus Mail: ROSS
> young257 at purdue.edu<mailto:young257 at purdue.edu>