[Closed] JomSocial + JSPT (JoomlaXI) Integration

You all are making great progress with Joomdle. I am looking to switch from JFusion to Joomdle as part of our school's roadmap.

Background: Today we use JomSocial with Moodle - joined with JFusion. JFusion only does SSO - without any data integration or logic applied. All registrations in Joomla are also in Moodle, etc.

We have different roles within JomSocial defined - i.e. Student, Parent, Teacher, Admin, etc. When you first register in the system, we ask different questions depending on the Profile Type selected at registration. i.e. questions we ask for parents are different than students, etc.

To give us the ability to have different profile types within JomSocial - we use JomSocial Profile Types. JSPT by JoomlaXi It is a popular 3rd party extension for JomSocial. It also allows us to approve all registration requests before being given access to our site.

Request: Only allow certain profile types to register for classes within Moodle.

Would be great to be selective - only allowing Teachers and Students to register for classes in Moodle - and to disallow Parents from directly registering for a class in Moodle. We sometimes have issues where Parents will mistakenly register for a class directly - thinking that they are registering their student. We then have to manually pull the parent's account from the class registration and place their student's account in the class instead.

To accomplish this, we would like to allow Parents to register in Joomla but NOT Moodle. Students and Teachers would be registered in both Joomla and Moodle. Is something like this possible?

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks!
Ron

Hi.

We are happy to see that you are liking Joomdle more these days

Reading your request I can say:
- What you want is not possible at the moment
- Being JSPT commercial software that we don't own, I think it will only be integrated when someone hires us to do it

But from this and your other post I have a doubt:
- Parent users would need to be able to "buy" courses for their children. I guess this can be done in Moodle (as for your comments), but this cannot be done in Virtuemart or Tienda, as the user making the purchase would be the one enroled in the courses.

Can you ellaborate on how this currently works on Moodle?

Thank you for considering. The way it works today:

1. Parent creates an account in Joomla. They provide registration information for the family.
2. Then they log out
3. Then they create an account in Joomla for their student(s).
4. After they are logged in as a student, they then go to the courses section of our site (Moodle with SSO) where they sign up / pay for the classes that they need.

So in short, Parents make the purchase while they are logged in with their student(s) account.

Another thought - with new Access Control System in Joomla 1.6 - is there a possibility of providing the capability to limit which accounts would be linked to Moodle based on this? Or even with 1.5 looking only at if they are either Registered, Author, Editor, or Admin?

Thanks again!
Ron

Ok, I understand it now: it is not parent users registering kids, but parents using their kids accounts to sign into courses.

Then, the exact same thing could be done for Joomdle with Virtuemart or Tienda.

For your other thoughts:
As for 1.6: yes, this could be a feature good to have.
As for 1.5: in theory, it could be done, but of course it would require coding.

I had a slightly different thought. I thought it would be more logical for Parents to purchase using their own accounts. Upon the point of purchase (or after), specifying which user id has access to the moodle course.

Ron when you select the role of Parent using JSPT, do you ask for the student's email address? Or vice-versa when registering the student to you link the Parent's email?

This would map into the Parents role in Moodle allowing Parent's to view particular student reports / records.

Yes - I completely agree that the most logical way for this to happen would be for parents to purchase and specify which user id has access. Would this be possible through VirtueMart or Tienda through Joomdle?

Here is some more background on how we have things set up today:

For parent registration, we ask them for their student's names (I like the idea of also asking for their student's email). For Parent registration, there are many other things they need to provide like contact info, approval for students to use site, etc. When student's register, we only ask for parent name, student email, "About me" for JomSocial (etc.), and to accept site terms. Parent registration is free, Student registration costs $xx per semester. We use AEC to track the student "subscriptions" on a per semester basis. If a student does not pay for the next semester, they are forced to the AEC plan page to re-enroll when they try to log in.

Today we manually link Parents via Parent Role defined in Moodle to both Students and Classes that their students are registered for. Once this is done, Parents can see class assignments, their students grades, etc. They also get copied on all class emails from the teacher. That said, the way we have the parent role defined, they can not see other student forum posts within the class, other student grades, etc.


Test results so far:

While testing yesterday, we found out that the Joomdle features work very well with this type of setup. When a parent logs in, on the frontpage they will see an integrated calendar with all assignments represented for all their students, along with links to all classes their students have, integrated news, etc. From a parent perspective, it is great - especially if they have 2-3+ students enrolled.

Receiving this immediate feedback on each one of their students is valuable - i.e. if they have any homework due tomorrow, what grade they received on their last assignment, etc. This will help the parent(s) to be an active part of their student's education.

If there was a way to automate the assignment of Parents during registration to Parent Role within Moodle through Joomdle, that would be a strong feature - especially for Elementary, Middle, and High schools - both public and private. This feature would likely not be of much use for Universities, etc.

A little recap on how we are going with this, as we should be sending you a copy for testing soon.
I am sure it can give some good discussion too.

* We added integration with JSPT, do let you decide which profile types should be created in Moodle.

* We added an option to auto enrol parents in children's courses when children enrol

* We have a working scheme of parent purchasing courses for children:
- A Joomdle config option enables the "shop for children"
- Parents register first
- Then they can create accounts for their children through Joomdle. This process also set them as parents in moodle.
- When they go to buy courses (Tienda or VM), they are not enroled in them, but instead the info is stored in Joomdle database
- After completing payment, they can go to "Assign Courses" page where they can enrol their children into the courses he bought
- Also, new children can be created at any time

This scheme does not use Jomsocial for linking students and parents, as they are already linked by the fact that the parent register their children while logged with his account.

We are yet to decide if offering another way of linking parents and students, using Jomsocial.

Antonio - this is great. I am looking forward to testing out all of the new features! Few quick questions:

1. Is there a way to associate Parents with Students that are already registered?

2. For parents that buy classes - can they go back in the next semester and order additional classes for their students?

3. Is there a way to link semester registration fees with Student accounts? i.e. do not let students be assigned to courses by their parents until they have paid their semester fee?

Thanks again - this is a huge step forward.

I knew it was worth it to advance some things

1. Not at the moment. Will think about it. Would it be ok to just transfer parent info from Moodle?

2. Don't know if I fully understand you here. Purchases are independent, and can be repeated at wish.

3. Again, I think you are thinking about AEC subscriptions here. With VM or Tienda, you sell access to courses, not semester subscriptions.

Solved 1 by syncing parent info from Moodle in backend, users section.

This also let me to notice one problem with this scheme of parent/child linking: only one parent can be set automatically.

That leads us back to using Jomsocial to define parent-child relationships. So, ideas to define it?
- Parents register first?
- Children register first?
- Both options available?
- Link through selected Jomsocial field