Students with multiple user accounts

Students with multiple user accounts

by Darrel Tenter -
Number of replies: 4

We're finding duplicate user accounts in our site. They belong to the same person, enroled in the same course more than once (we have open enrolments or enrolment keys on some courses). Everytime it is because the student has enrolled in the same course twice using two usernames. An example is John Smith. John signed up for the a course twice. Once with the username ‘jsmith@gmail.com’, and then again with the username ‘johnsmith@gmail.com’.

Is there any way to identify these folks who have more than one username and merge them or clear them out, being sure they are in fact the same person? We'd like to use some unique identifer at registration to prevent this, but if an individual has two email addresses, how can we prevent it?

Thank you.

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In reply to Darrel Tenter

Re: Students with multiple user accounts

by Jesus Aquino -

I think, there is no way to prevent it... two different students could have the same name and lastname... I'm not sure but if professors can enroll students manually or validate users that want to enroll in the course that will be a better way to go on....

On another hand.. if you want to know if exist two students with the same name and last name, you could try sql query directly on DB to find out duplicated records.. but like I said before, two different students could have the same name...

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In reply to Jesus Aquino

Re: Students with multiple user accounts

by Ramesh Jambulingam -

Hi Aquino,

I would suggest you to generate unique username from given firstname/lastname/email instead of using email for user authentication. 

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In reply to Darrel Tenter

Re: Students with multiple user accounts

by Howard Miller -
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A report could be written.... but... how do identify manually that two accounts are *definitely* the same person?

It's not really a Moodle issue. If this really matters to you I would recommend using a proper student registration process and authenticating against that. That would probably be external LDAP auth. A whole different matter of course.
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In reply to Darrel Tenter

Re: Students with multiple user accounts

by Luis de Vasconcelos -

Moodle does not have a "Merge User" function yet. If you want that to change then vote for MLD-24443 in the Moodle Tracker.

In the meantime, you can try some of the scripts that have been shared in the User Merge Utility discussion. As you can see, there's clearly a need for this functionality...

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