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Can students share AGOL items only with Professor?

UofSC_KevinHaynes

A professor asked me if there is a way for her students to share their assignments in a way that only she can see. It's got me thrown for a loop. It makes sense that we don't want student work visible to the whole class or the whole organization.

I guess they could transfer items to the professor, but I don't think students would be able to figure it out, and it would cause all kinds of confusion, especially for GEOG105 students. Another way would be to have groups for each student and add the professor into the group so that only two of them could view the content, but that isn't feasible to create for hundreds of students. I've always wished we could share items with individual users.

Has anyone else dealt with this?

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MappyIan

Yeah, I did wonder about data protection type stuff, but I can't think of any other way you could do it. If you create a group with the professor and all the students, the students would be able to see each others work. I think your only option is to create a group for each student which has just the professor and one student as members. I dare say you could script the creation of the groups through ArcGIS Notebooks. Might take a bit of time to set up the first time, but once you have the script you'd be able to run it in subsequent years with just minor tweaks. I'd be interested to know if anyone has any other solutions.

SaraJL

This is definitely an option!

However, I'll just put this out there - in my experience, if I've ever had someone purposely do something in AGOL that goes against our policies, it's almost always been a professor 😁 I actually had to lock down our site because I had a professor adding random ArcGIS non-org accounts to our site that I can't get rid of now even though I am an Admin....(I have everyone assigned a custom role now so they can't do that anymore)

Also - because Admin rights give access to the entire site, there is somewhat of a possibility of violating FERPA.

MappyIan

I presume you're talking about ArcGIS Online here. One thing you could do is elevate the permissions of the professor (assuming you trust them!) to give them Admin rights. That way they'd be able to access everything without it needing to be specifically shared with them. The students could just email a link to the relevant item and the professor would be able to access it. It's not ideal because it would give the professor edit rights over everything in your organisation, but if they're competent in using AGOL it would be a quick and easy way to get around the problem. You could just give them admin rights for a short period of time to review/mark the assignments, which would reduce the risk.

SaraJL

To share - the project visibility settings either need to be "organization only" or "public unlisted". Then the students can just take the URL link to the project and post that to the LMS! They wouldn't have the ability to do any collaborative editing, so it's not for group projects (for group projects you might be out of luck - they would have to use the AGOL group for that)

So the process in a nutshell would be:

Students publish their project
Set the visibility to public
Make sure "show in web search results" is unchecked
Post the project URL link to LMS (skip AGOL groups altogether)

"Organization only" would technically still make it searchable in the organization AGOL site - so if you wanted to make it 100% not searchable, then I would go with the "public unlisted" method. This would mean that the someone can't search for it and it's only visible to someone with the link.

I have a short video on how to do it! (I make a lot of short custom tutorials for classes I work with)

I hope that helps!

UofSC_KevinHaynes

That all sounds like what I've been thinking.

For your LMS solution, how do the students share the item on AGOL? They share the link to the LMS but how is it shared? If it's shared with the organization, it's still technically public, right? If it weren't shared with the Org, everyone, or a setup group, it would still prompt for a username and nothing, but the students would work if it wasn't shared with someone other than the creator.

I will bring up the reason why they need them to be private. I also don't see why that should be a big deal.

SaraJL

When this has happened in the past - I actually tell the professors to have students post the project links to their LMS. On our campus, we use Moodle - so we can use a Moodle Assignment or Forum, and then the professor can see it and grade it, but no one else in the class can see it unless that student shares the link. It's not an ArcGIS-based solution, but it usually works pretty well.

The challenge is that the students need to be part of the AGOL group in order to submit - and there really aren't good visibility settings for that. Once someone has access to the group, they can see everything (even if it's not a shared editing group). You could create a separate AGOL groups and just add one student and the professor - but that might not be super feasible in most situations (unless it's a really small class). And will create an outrageous amount of groups.

Transferring ownership doesn't really work unless you want to give the students a role with higher permissions (most of the time it requires an admin unless it's a custom role). But there may be a way to play around with a custom role to make it easier.

I also try to have a conversation with the professor on the reasoning! Tbh - in my experience, most of the time students don't care. If it's a class where everyone is a beginner to GIS, sometimes it's helpful for those who are not confident in the tech to see other projects. There is definitely a noticeable improvement in the type of projects if students can share their work with the rest of the class. In the 6 years I've worked here, people don't plagiarize other projects, but I have seen people get more confident in the tools because they can see more examples.

However - once in a while we'll get one where students are posting personal things in (we have a digital journaling project), and that is something I would probably tell the professor to use Moodle if someone doesn't want to share it with the class.

UofSC_KevinHaynes

I'll try that; I was under the assumption that users can only share with groups that they belong to. I'm going to test that. Thanks.

Lee_Butler

You could create a group in AGOL that the professor has access to and for each student to share their content to this group.

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