Add a student

As the system administrator, you are usually able to pre-load a Manhattan classroom with the students who are registered for a course. Nevertheless, there will be occasions when you will need to add additional students to a classroom.

While most of the Configuration commands described within this chapter work the same for teachers and for system administrator's, the Add a student and Add a teacher commands are exceptions. Recall that when you first installed Manhattan you had an option to edit a custom.h file that controls certain behaviors (see Installation Step 6 Two of the items within the file:

#define ALLOW_TEACHER_CREATE_NEW_ACCOUNT 0
#define ALLOW_TEACHER_SELECT_USER_BY_COURSE 0

directly affect what teachers see in this section of the Configuration menu.

Teachers can always add a student or teacher to their classroom by performing a search, then selecting from a list of users who already have centralized Manhattan accounts. That's a default setting that can't be taken away from teachers by editing the custom.h before compiling Manhattan.

But suppose the teacher wants to add a student who doesn't already have a Manhattan account? Do you, as system administrator, want that teacher to create an entirely new account for that student? (In our experience the answer is "No" - invariably they'll make data entry errors, which you'll have to clean up later!)

If you set ALLOW_TEACHER_CREATE_NEW_ACCOUNT to '1' in custom.h, teachers will get a form that prompts them for the name and ID number of the entirely new person they want to add to the central database of users. This form will appear only after they do a search for the student, and appears whether or not the search was successful.

If this feature is turned off, by setting ALLOW_TEACHER_CREATE_NEW_ACCOUNT to 0, teachers will only be able to add existing users to their classrooms. They'll have to contact the system administrator - that's you - if they need to add an entirely new student or teacher to their classroom.

The second decision to make is whether or not you want to enable teachers to get a list of students/teachers in any other "normal" or "centralized" course on the server, so they can select students from that list to add to their classroom. This feature is useful in certain (typically K-12) environments. It allows a teacher, for example, to quickly add some or all students in Mrs. Smith's Biology class to their own class.

A good reason to disable this feature is to protect the privacy of students/teachers. When this feature is turned on, any teacher on the system can see who is enrolled in every Manhattan course on the system. That is, a teacher can browse through the rosters of courses other than their own.

Set ALLOW_TEACHER_SELECT_USER_BY_COURSE to 1 to enable this feature, and to 0 to disable this feature.

Both of these options are always enabled for the system administrator. When YOU "Add a student" or "Add a teacher", both of these features will be enabled, regardless of the settings in custom.h file.

These settings apply only to courses tied to the central store of usernames/passwords - that is, "normal" courses and "course templates". Teachers can always freely add students/teachers to standalone courses, even by inventing names and ID numbers. Teachers of standalone courses can NOT see any lists of centralized users.

When you click on the Add a student link, you'll see this form:

To add a student, type in all or part of their name or ID number into the text box and click the Search button. You'll get a list of all matches, from which you can select a person to add to the classroom:

The list of matches (if any) appears at the bottom of the page. Scroll down!

As shown in the above screenshot, the results of the search also includes a form that allows you to add a completely new user to Manhattan. Thus, here are the steps that you, the system administrator, should follow to add a student to a Manhattan course:

1. Access the course's configuration menu via the Configure courses link on your administrator's menu.

2. Click on the Add a student link.

3. Enter the student's last name (or ID number) into the text box and click the Search button.

4. Scroll down to see the results of the search. If the person has been found, select them from the list and submit the form.

5. If the person cannot be found, perhaps after trying several searches, use the "Create New Account" form to add the completely new user to the course, and to Manhattan's central store of user information.

The form that allows you to add a completely new user to the system appears only after you have performed a search for a user. This is to discourage you (and teachers if you enable them to use this feature) from attempting to create an entirely new Manhattan account before you are certain the person doesn't already have an account.