View/modify/delete users

The search users form

Click on the View/modify/delete users on the administrator's main menu. You'll get the following form:

The form has a text box where you can type in all or part of something that identifies a person, including their username, their real name, or their ID number. As for searching for courses, if you leave that text area blank, you will include all users.

Whatever you type in the text box (if anything) is filtered by the selections made with the radio buttons on the rest of the form. Take a moment to review what your choices are. We won't go over every possibility, but instead we'll do some basic searches.

The "List users without classes for quick deletion" link is not really part of the search form. We'll use that at the very end of the tutorial to remove all users from your installation, after we've deleted their courses.

A quick list of all users

Let's start with the easiest search. With the form set just like it's shown in the previous section, click the Search button. This provides a "quick" list of all users on the system (again, except those in "standalone" courses).

Viewing Prof. Einstein's profile

From the "quick list" of users, click on Albert Einstein's username to get to his full profile:

After clicking Albert Einstein's link, you'll see this:

The information on this page should be largely self-explanatory. Nevertheless, here's a quick rundown of the items. Feel free to experiment by trying the various commands.

• Prof. Einstein is a teacher in the PHY 101 01 course, stored internally in the course group try, and with the internal course name of phy10101

• He also owns one course template for his Physics course stored internally as Tae4322/Tphy101

• If Albert tells you that he forgot his password, you could click on the Reset Password button. After saying OK to a confirmation prompt, his password will be reset to be the same as his username again, ae4322. He can use that password to login, and Manhattan will force him to select another password.

• You can click on the Log Data button to view a history of Prof. Einstein's logins. The events recorded in the logs are described in Login Logs.

• If for some reason, Albert prefers to be known as "Al", you can click the Modify Name button to make the change.

• The button labeled Completely Remove this User from System won't do anything for Prof. Einstein but give you a message "You cannot remove a user until you have deleted him from all of his classes.". Because every classroom must have a teacher, you are not able to remove teachers from a classroom using this form. (If a course has more than one teacher, you can remove one of the teachers by entering the configuration menu for the course by searching for it under the "Configure courses" option of the administrative menu. See Delete a student or a teacher.)

About a user's "Personal Info"

As described in Manhattan 2.2 Teacher's Reference, Manhattan allows users to create and maintain a simple "Personal Info Page". They can update their personal info to list their email address, web site, and a number of user defined fields for listing things like phone number, office address, etc. A person's personal info can also include a photograph and a narrative. If a teacher enables the People module within a Manhattan classroom, students can see each other's personal info pages. In addition, all Manhattan messages then will include links to the personal info of the sender.

As the server administrator, you can view and edit the personal info of any user on the system (except for those in standalone courses.) Having the ability to view the personal info of a user can come in handy when providing help desk support, if the person has included some contact information such as their email address. The ability to edit anyone's personal info was given to the administrator for two reasons. First, it allows administrators to help users update their personal info. Second, it allows the administrator to delete objectionable photos posted by immature students. (The ability for the administrator to ban the use of a personal info page by a particular user may be included in future versions of Manhattan.)

To view or edit Professor Einstein's personal info, you can click on his name while viewing his full record (see the above screenshot). Here's what Prof. Einstein's personal info might look like:

If you'd like, you can experiment by creating a personal info page for Prof. Einstein - click the Edit button while viewing his personal info page.

A few notes about users

Here's some general comments about working with users:

• This section of the administrative system can only give you information about users who belong to "normal" courses, or "course templates". Users in standalone courses are not listed, because, well they are standalone courses! You can however, still do things like reset a user's password in a standalone course by accessing the course from the Configure courses link on the administrative menu.

• A person is defined as a "teacher" if they are a teacher in one or more courses. A person can be a teacher in one course and a student in another.

• As you'll see at the end of this tutorial, a person retains their Manhattan account even when they no longer are a student or a teacher in any classroom on the server. The search form has an option for listing "Users without classes" and you can also use the link List users without classes for quick deletion below the form to see who these users are, and to delete them from the server if you wish.

• The following tasks can be done either from the user's full record under the View/modify/delete users option, or from the course's configuration menu accessible to you via the Configure courses option on the administrator's menu. Since these commands are available on a course's configuration menu, they can be performed by teachers as well as system administrators:

  • Resetting a person's password to be the same as their username.

  • Removing a student from a course. (Removing a teacher from a course can only be done from the course's configuration menu and only if there is more than one teacher in the course.)

On your own

Feel free to experiment with the options available in this section of the administrative program. A few things you can try include:

• List only teachers, then only students.

• Search for all users with "mar" as part of their name.

• Reset Albert Einstein's password. Log in as him, and change his password back to relativity. Back in the administrative system, look at his login records. What get's recorded?

• Delete Marie Curie from all of her classrooms (actually there should be only one). Then search for users without classes. Completely remove her from the system.

• Search for your super-user account. Is it there? (No - system administrators are not included among the users.)