Our IT department is in the middle of a project to move to a single username for each user for their entire time at the University. Up until now, if a student has gone from, say, being an Undergraduate to a Postgraduate, they are given a new username since their username indicates their University status. They can also obtain a new username if they move departments since this is also indicated by their username.

However, whilst the format of our old usernames allowed you to identify the department and status of a user simply by the first 3 characters, the new usernames will be random and it will not be possible to deduce any such information from the username. This is going to create problems for our instructors since many have come to rely on the old format to identify whether they are enrolling the correct, say, John Smith on a course.

Having selected 'Enrol User' from the Control Panel, we would like to see both the Department and possibly the primary Institution Role or the Education Level of a user displayed (although these relate to levels in the US rather than here in the UK), in addition to the current fields of Name, Username and Email. Although Role is displayed, this relates to the course role and obviously means nothing at the point of enrolment since all values are set to None.

I would be extremely interested to here whether anyone has experienced the same problems with random usernames. Were you able to resolve this and/or are you aware of any building block that might display the information we need when enrolling users on a course?

Many thanks,

Helena Bampton

VLE Support Officer

Corporation Information Systems Support,

IT Services, University of Reading,

Whiteknights Reading RG6 6AF

Phone: +44-(0)118-378-4440 Fax: +44-(0)118-975-3094