CUNY Academic Commons

I added Chris Stein as a watcher here in the hopes he can answer

The initial Zendesk ticket about this was opened by Sam Sloves, one of the BMCC teaching fellows. He now writes:

"Natalie still does not appear to me.

Based on advice that I got in my summer workshop on starting a common’s site, I was advised by your people to have students sign up, then invite them by name after they had signed up on the commons. When I try to do that for Natalie, I get an error message that there is no such member?

Please advise.

I have 100+ students and I would like to create simple and efficient system for onboarding them."

Boone, you had noted "Not all users get roles on the main Commons site - maybe this is the case for those activated via Unconfirmed? - so you won't see them in https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/users.php, only in the Network Admin" but I'm not sure what to do.

I'm not even sure who to turn to besides you both (Matt and Boone) - Laurie? Tom? Luke?

Happy to take any direction.

The user is registered, but doesn't appear to have logged into the site. As such, the user doesn't show up as "active", and thus doesn't show up when searching in the Invitations modal. Do we want to reconsider this behavior, by showing even users that have not logged into the site? If so, I'd suggest opening a separate feature request ticket to track the issue. In any case, my interpretation of "When I try to do that for Natalie, I get an error message that there is no such member?" is that the instructor is searching in the Invitations modal and not finding a user by the name, and this is the reason.

I have 100+ students and I would like to create simple and efficient system for onboarding them."

As far as the broader issue is concerned, the invitation system was designed to work like this: the instructor enters a list of students, either by searching for existing users or by email address, and the invitation includes invites to join a group and/or a site that's associated with the course. When used in this way, it should be possible for the instructor to invite all users to the course at the same time, whether or not they have already registered for the Commons (or have confirmed their registration, or have logged in for the first time). This instructor is only searching for existing users. If our documentation tells instructors that they should wait for their students to register for the site, and then invite them to join the course, then perhaps the documentation ought to be updated; this is the workflow that used to be required on the Commons, and was part of the motivation for building the new system.

Scott and Steve -- please see this thread and Boone's comment here -- https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/projects/cunyac/activity?from=2018-09-05 . Should we adjust our documentation?

Please change the kenneth.kardi68@stu.bmcc.cuny.edu user email to kenneth.kardi@stu.bmcc.cuny.edu. Thanks!

done and activated

Sorry, I’m late noticing that you asked for my input. Regarding BMCC Students they will have first.last@stu.bmcc.cuny.edu. If there is more than one with the same name I think the rule is to just start adding 1 to the user name and go up from there.

I have noticed that students are getting confused with the two logins because they are so similar. Also, because they are using their CUNYfirst login to get on Blackboard now it’s understandable if they think they should use that one to create their Commons login.

Faculty inviting the students (instead of asking students to register and then ask to be invited) does seem the best route. If you like I can arrange to sit down with Sam Sloves and see how the process was for him and if there is anything we can learn or adjust from that experience.
Best,
Chris

Yes, it's quite lame that it's still a problem. We could potentially have some client-side verification so that, when a user enters a stu.bmcc.cuny.edu address, and the first part of the address is trailed by numbers (Boone.Gorges45 or whatever) then we show a message along the lines of "Please be sure you are entering your email address and not your CUNYFirst ID. Did you mean 'Boone.Gorges@stu.bmcc.cuny.edu'?" (See #10230 and https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/attachments/8682/Screenshot_2018-08-29_20-05-44.png for what this might look like.) I do not want to be in the business of maintaining separate validation rules for each campus, but if it would save lots of headache in this specific case, it might be worth doing.

I almost never say this but it's a slippery slope and not enough of a headache from my POV.