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- Maintain separate edX and anonymous accounts, but create a connection between them so that students (and researchers) can track their activities together.
- Merge the anonymous and edX accounts, so that a user always works in the context of the same account regardless of how they get into the edX system.
One user, Some considerations here:
- Any given user may have accounts on multiple campus systems
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- (so the mapping is one-to-many, rather than one-to-one).
- Do we want to support a user having multiple edX accounts (making the mapping many-to-many)?
- A student may end up using many different Open edX installations - one class may be on edx.org, another on edge.edx.org, etc.
- This should be transparent to the user, given the requirements in the MVP document
- Transparency is bad in this case, since the student may be confused as to when accounts can be linked.
Requirement: Batch upload of student data
A course admin should be able to create edX accounts for all students in a single batch operation, simplifying the identity mapping process.
The admin must know the user_id that the LMS will send to edX so that edX can identify a user as a member of the uploaded group. This isn't a given - the LTI spec says that a user_id should not contain any personally identifying information and may be generated internally by the tool consumer. The instructor may not have access to the ID that will be sent. In order to use this mode, we may have to require additional information in the LTI launch that provides some identifier that is available to the instructor.
Open Questions
- Can anonymous users interact as fully as regular users? Does it make sense for LTI users to post on discussion boards, see grades, etc?
Cookie issues:
- User has an existing cookie on LTI launch. Do they get logged out? Merge accounts? May not want to.
- User logged in anonymously via LTI. Next time they visit edx.org will they automatically log in?
- Cookie from campus system A, visits using campus system B.
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