Share group with other groups - not just pages

[Gordon McLeod]

Enhancement request.
I've recently developed a number of resource groups with multiple pages/collections to be shared with staff and students across several years and programmes. Auto enrol all users isn't an option as we need to restrict access to the content and our Mahara is accessed university wide. Adding staff and students to year cohorts and sharing the resource groups with those would allow the necessary level of access filtering, but in order to share the content of the resource groups with the 'cohort group' you need to share access at the page or collection level rather than at group level. If it was possible to 'share with group' at the group (rather than page) level and effectively give any member of group A the right to access the content in group B that would make the process much easier - making sharing 1 click instead of 6 to 10 page/collection shares per group.
Regards, Gordon.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

So pretty much you want to be able to bulk share pages / collections?

[Gordon McLeod (g-mcleod1)]

Hi Kristina,
Yes. We want to be able to bulk share the entire group with selected other groups rather than having to share each page or collection within the group separately.
Regards, Gordon.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Hi Gordon,

Sharing is only possible on a page / collection level. You cannot share an entire group. ;-) You can only share its pages / collections. The rest, e.g. forums is handled through the group settings of who can see group content and who can't.

Sorry for the semantics, but just to make sure we know what we are talking about. :-)

Cheers
Kristina

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

I guess functionally, this is about bulk access rights, with "groups" just being the handy way that we combine the content that we want to grant access to.

But more specifically, I think we're talking about changing the concept of "group membership". Currently, group membership is a list of specific individual users. Gordon's talking about changing that so that you can say "any member of group X will be a member of this group".

It's the first step down the slippery slope of creating a logic-based "cohort" system like Moodle has. ;)

BUT, if we restricted it to just groups, it's sorta doable. The only slippery part is whether you want to make it recursive. For instance, if group B is set to include all members of group A; and group C is set to include all members of group B; then does it inherit down the chain so that all members of group A are in group C?

Logically, it makes the most sense if it's recursive. Implementation-wise, it's a lot easier if group membership can only be one level deep. I'd be in favor of having a full-recursive "groups can be members of groups" feature, but it will be non-trivial to implement.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

I think a clarification would be good around what "content" is. Because if it is only pages / collections and their artefacts, then sharing pages / collections in bulk could be the thing. Whereas "content" should also mean that the group of users become members of the group in order to also participate in forum discussions, upload files etc. then it would be more of what you are talking about, Aaron, and a hierarchical system of groups could be beneficial.

[Gordon McLeod (g-mcleod1)]

The aspect that prompted the current thread was about easy access to the resources on the pages without making them 'open', as Aaron commented. I guess it would start to look like a cohort enrolment system - but that's one of the ways I've been using Mahara groups in a teaching context - for disseminating information resources meant to be shared with student year cohorts. Admin users are assigned who can upload content, create pages, etc and if users wanted to participate using forums the group could have request membership if it was necessary to restrict access.

Something I did notice while manually assigning shared group access to the multiple pages/collections of a resource group was that the users then get an e-mail notification for every page/collection that is shared, so end up with 6-8 messages (per group shared) rather than a single notice for each group.

I'm just wondering - if a group A page is shared with group B, do the users in group B have rights to post to forums in group A? If not then this would just be an extension of the same rights but set higher up the chain so that viewing access is granted to all pages in one go. I appreciate that's a simplification of the actual work involved! ;)

I guess the question of hierarchical groups ties in with this wishlist feature for sub groups https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1169962

Regards, Gordon.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Hello Gordon,

I see two streams here:

1. Have "groups" (or let's call them cohorts for easier distinction in terminology) like "Friends" who you can add as a bunch of people to give them access to view pages and collections. That would take care of your requirement "for disseminating information resources meant to be shared with student year cohorts. Admin users are assigned who can upload content, create pages, etc and if users wanted to participate using forums the group could have request membership if it was necessary to restrict access."

These cohorts would be people who then only can view pages based on being in that cohort, but they could not participate in a group discussion or upload files because they are actually not members of the group.

2. Allow cohorts to be enrolled in a group so that they can be full-fledged members of a group and participate in forum discussions for example.

As far as your other questions / comments go:

If you do not want your group members to get notified when someone shared a page with the group, you can turn off "Shared page notifications" in the group edit screen.

As far as "if a group A page is shared with group B, do the users in group B have rights to post to forums in group A?" goes: No. That is not possible at the moment unless you make all group B members also members of group A. And yes, this would tie in with the other wishlist item.

[Gordon McLeod (g-mcleod1)]

Hello Kristina,

Yes - that seems to scope the two elements. Stream 1 would be my preference if that's more easily achieved - if you want participation rather than just access to the group resources then it would seem reasonable to insist that users actively join the group (though that would be easier if stream 2 was possible).

Regarding the notifications - page notifications are already turned off for the groups, but the emails still keep arriving.

Regards, Gordon.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Do the users who are members of the group get the email notifications or the users with whom group pages / collections are shared who are not members of the group? Can you rule out that the pages aren't also shared with the users individually?

Or are you talking about notifications when you share group pages? The "Shared pages notification" only affects user's pages that they share with the group but not when group pages are shared.

[Gordon McLeod (g-mcleod1)]

Hi Kristina,

As far as I can tell those who are already in the group being shared with the 'cohort' group get an email for every page or collection that the cohort group is given access to. Those pages definately aren't shared with the users individually as well. I can't say 100% as the only staff who've mentioned the notifications have all been test user members of the groups that were shared, but given there were over 20 e-mails I would be surprised if someone already assigned to the cohort group didn't say anything. We added the bulk of the users to the groups after I set up the shared options - so far nobody has come to me to say they've had lots of messages. They were told they might get some 1-off enrolment emails, but I'd be astonished if none of the 150 users mentioned the volume of notifications. I'm a member of all of the groups (including the cohort) and also got the messages.

Regards, Gordon.