Duplicate Student Logon Names

[ICT Support]

Good morning.

We have an issue around students and their Google Site ‘ePortfolios’ that has confounded us for a while and we can’t find a solution to.

 

Our student accounts are created first in Active Directory (AD) and then synch-ed to Google.

They are then enrolled into Hapara Teacher Dashboard (TD). Their Google account includes a Google Site template which they use to construct an ePortfolio’ recording their progress during the year. AD & Google do not permit duplicate Logon Names and at the end of the academic year leaving student accounts in AD and Google are deleted. TD configuration is archived.

 

What we are finding is that new students who share the same login name (first initial, surname) as a previous student will receive the old students site instead of a new one from our template even though the account was previously deleted. Neither Hapara or Google can offer a solution, so I’m wondering if anyone has seen the same phenomena or has a suggestion.

Nga mihi

Regards.

Brian Bowell

ICT Manager.

Berkley Normal Middle School

Hamilton, 3216, New Zealand.

[James Smith]

Hi Brian,

You probably don’t want to hear this, but you don’t want to reuse usernames. This maybe just the start of the problems. 

What happens when a past student signs up for junk mail, does the next user have to go through and unsubscribe to them?

As a long term thought, you should move to something more unique. We, like many schools use a combination that includes their student number, which is always going to be unique to that student.

Not helpful now, but good to plan for the future. I’d been there, I had to switch from names to numbers years back. Look at my name, not very unique, pretty hard to find a username :)

James Smith

Parklands Christian College

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Yours sincerely,

James Smith
IT Manager

Parklands Christian College
11 Hillcrest Road Park Ridge Qld 4125 
(07) 3380 4200 | www.parklands.qld.edu.au 

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[ICT Support]

James good afternoon.

We set up our accounts so that they would not permit duplicate Logon Names. The challenge is that once Google accounts are deleted it's impossible to check for duplicates. We've now got a handle on the underlying issue though.

We use Hapara Teacher Dashboard as a portal for academic staff to manage students' learning. When you create a student AD/Google account, which includes their ePortfolio Google site, ownership is vested by TD  to the student AND all the staff who need to work with it. Deleting the account does not delete the site because of multiple ownership.

Google publishes a help file on how to delete a  site manually but it's really pretty useless.

The quick and dirty solution is as you describe. For 2020 will add the suffix '20' to each new account.

Regards.

Regards.

Brian Bowell

ICT Manager.

Berkley Normal Middle School

Hamilton, 3216, New Zealand.

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[anthony.speranza]

Unfortunately there isn't much you can do once the duplicate has occurred.

To prevent this each subsequent occurrence of an existing or previous username has a number added to the end. For example, if Billy Smith enrolled in 2014 and he received the username bsmith@, when Brenda Smith enrolls in 2019 she receives the username bsmith1@.

This is not entirely ideal but does prevent what you are describing (and a variety of other things) from happening. The best thing about this is that you can easily guess the email of 95% of your users without a contact list. It's a happy medium between that and going completely unique to student / staff identification numbers. 

FWIW, we never delete accounts in AD or Google at the end of the year, just suspend for any outgoing staff or students (also helps with retention laws)

[ICT Support]

Good morning and thanks for the responses. We know now what is at the root of this issue. Hapara Teacher Dashboard makes all the staff who need access to a student's TD entry owners of their ePortfolio. So, When the student account is suspended or deleted the multiple ownership means the ePortfolio is not deleted. So, when a student account with a duplicate logon name occurs it is linked to the older ePortfolio. When the occasional duplicate cropped up this is what happened.

We were running checks to avoid this but clearly not rigorous enough. An enrolment year suffix on new logon names will deal with this.

Regards.

Brian Bowell

ICT Manager.

Berkley Normal Middle School

Hamilton, 3216, New Zealand.

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