Moodle

Assigning to me temporarily because Vy-Shane no longer works for Moodle HQ.

Martin - This idea of being able to specify a nickname for the student recently came up again in the forums (http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=120147#p536799). I also think the idea of having an official school picture that would show up in gradebook reports and the like is not a bad idea and continuing to the profile picture to be their public image. With both nicknames and official image requests, the question that will be hotly debated is when and where to use them versus the formal name and public image. Folks will probably want to customize this so that I can the official image in participants and gradebook, etc. Just thinking out loud (i.e. I have not thought this through at all), but perhaps we could use the Navigation 2.0 and new $PAGE to specify whether the page is a formal or informal. A formal page would use official image and current fullname, an informal page would use public image and nickname, and we could even have semiformal (picture) with the formal name and public picture and semiformal (name) with the informal name and official picture. To be honest, I am not sure this is worth doing. Part of my thinking is that as Moodle becomes more communicative and able to integrate with Student Information Systems, the Moodle image and name could be the informal image and nickname (give the students the ability to change their first name). The idnumber field or some other field would link Moodle to the SIS which maintains the official name for transcripts, the official identification pictures, etc.

As for item #3, I believe that this has likely been resolved. Admins can change email addresses, lock them from being changed, etc. I also believe there have been some methods added to identify blocked email addresses.

Peace - Anthony

I would like to add some relevance to this issue - it is not just for fun. Our organization has international participants and it is customary for some participants to adopt a 'friendly' nickname when participating in global events. Our learning system is a global system, so we would like to accomodate this practice.

In a forum post, I suggested a work around where we use the existing 'firstname' field for the 'friendly' name, thus it will display from learner to learner in course and forum activities. We then added a custom profile field called 'lglfirstname' which contains the learners actual name of record for purposes of reporting to learning sponsors and the leadership. see http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=120147#p537100

In that discussion, others have commented on the value of providing a means for nickname or 'friendly' names where there are concerns for the privacy of minors in forums and learner to learner interactions.

cheers
-james

James - As I continue to think about the issue of how to deal with a nickname I think it is best treated as a patch. The primary reason why I think this would be impractical if not impossible to introduce into core is that the various contexts in which folks would expect formal versus informal would differ at each site. I do not think we could ever agree upon what areas should be more formal versus those that should be informal. One possibility would be that it depend upon the person's role in a particular context. But I think folks might even disagree about that. The way that the patch could be implemented would be to modify fullname such that it could accept a parameter for the formality level. It would be true by default. When false, i.e. not a formal name, then the fullname could use $USER->nickname (assuming the field is added to the user database) in place of $USER->firstname. It would still follow the same order of firstname lastname or lastname, firstname according to local custom. In that way, folks could then work their way through the code and add the $formality parameter as being FALSE whenever they wanted to use the nickname. Peace - Anthony

Anthony, those are excellent ideas. I do not have a particular solution in mind so much as brining to light that the current firstname lastname option is just too limited.

Our workaround is fine since as an administrator I can know to look for/enter the legal name in a field that is not really obvious to the learner. At this time, it really is about having the option to connect a friendly name to a legal name.

Continuing your idea it could be useful to have 3 name fields, but allow them to be re-identified according to need such that name1, name2 and name3 each could have dropdown options for 'first name, last name, nick name, legal name, friendly name, regional name'... etc.

cheer
-j

This is an issue for local students, international students, and transgender students. While there are legal means to change names and policies and procedures through admissions and records, not everyone has access to these means. Further, the social networking conventions of allowing use of a nickname would best tie to our Moodle system - in pedagogy and practice.

SIS integration would keep the legal name for the first name/last name fields, but if there were a sys admin menu toggle that allowed the discussion forum posts to use the nickname for display rather than the legal first name, this would help. Then in the gradebook there could also be a toggle for displaying the nickname, just as there is currently a toggle for displaying the ID number.

Related to the "anonymous" preferred name stuff that Shane was working on.