Our Moodle usernames are based on email address, and this gives me two headaches;
1) Our legacy registry systems are not very good at maintaining up to date email addresses, even for current students. On the other hand, the legacy systems generally attach a student idnumber to every report that is produced
2) Moodle is ambiguous in its treatment of the username as the ctritical element of the students record - if I want a student username listing from moodle as a teacher, I have to get it from the grades listing. We frequently use 'choices' to enrol students in electives, and sure enough, the listing of choices includes the student idnumber, but NOT the username. Thus I have to hack two separate listings/downloads from a course page to match student choices with the username, which can then be bulk uploaded as bulk course enrolment.
In summary,
- the deficiency of our legacy system is that it won't produce usernames (email addresses) that Moodl relies on
- the deficiency of Moodle is that it gives primacy to the Moodle username, in preference to the idnumber, the latter being the most common unchanging element of a students existence in most institutions.
1) All download reports from Moodle need to include username.
2) Upload users (into courses) needs to be able to treat idnumber as the unique record indicator as well as / in combination with username.
A further point is that upload users needs to have the capacity to cross check idnumber, username, email address and name to improve the identification of potential duplicate registrations - particularly in our institution where, in addition to the usual 'name' headaches we have 92 nationalities and naming conventions to work with.
Is there support for seeing this added as an improvement request, or have I missed an existing function in moodle that will do these things anyway?
Thanks for your time,
Paul