[LON-CAPA-users] unique usernames and discussion board

Nathan Schoenack lon-capa-users@mail.lon-capa.org
Mon, 30 Aug 2004 09:06:28 -0500


Here at NDSU we use the e-mail address (without the @ndsu.nodak.edu or
@colorado.edu in your case) as the username, and their student ID as their
initial password.  So, for instance, your username would be "stevenpollock"
and your password would be whatever your ID is (LON-CAPA doesn't like '.'s
is the username).

We have another course management utility on campus (blackboard) which is
widely used.  I request a digital course list for blackboard (it's a .csv
file), eliminate the '.'s from the usernames, and then enroll students
through ENRL -> "upload a class list".  From there you associate each column
of the csv file with enrollment information (first name, last name,
username, initial password).

I hope that explanation isn't too specific to our solution at NDSU, but to
answer your question more directly, all of your students should have unique
usernames if they have unique e-mail addresses.  We just use the same
usernames for LON-CAPA.

Nathan

-----Original Message-----
From: lon-capa-users-admin@mail.lon-capa.org
[mailto:lon-capa-users-admin@mail.lon-capa.org]On Behalf Of Michael
Dubson
Sent: Sunday, August 29, 2004 6:13 PM
To: lon-capa-users@mail.lon-capa.org
Cc: Steven.Pollock@colorado.edu
Subject: [LON-CAPA-users] unique usernames and discussion board


We are new to lon-capa, implementing it here at U.Colorado Boulder for the
first this fall.  At CU, the student ID is the student's social security
number, which must be kept private of course.  We cannot figure out how to
assign a unique username to all 1000 students in the system, so we made
their student ID both the username and the initial password.  The problem
with this is that when students post a discussion, their username/SS# is
displayed, unless they post anonymously.

How do other schools handle this problem?  English names are never unique,
so how does one assign unique usernames?

Is there anyway to turn off non-anonymous discussion, so that only
anonymous discussion is allowed?

Is there any other way around this problem that we haven't thought of?

This issue would be very urgent except for the fact that discussion is
broken (in the latest version) and we haven't yet implemented the fix.

-thanks in advance, Mike Dubson

Michael Dubson, Senior Instructor
Dept. of Physics
University of Colorado at Boulder
Boulder, CO 80309

phone: (303)492-4938
FAX: (303)492-3352
email: dubson@spot.colorado.edu
homepage: http://spot.colorado.edu/~dubson/


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