edurole - getting started

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GETTING STARTED THE EDUROLE PLATFRORM MANAGEMENT MANUAL Welcome, this is the managers manual to the EduRole Student Information System. This manual will help you set up your institutions student information system and serves and an introduction to the project. How your institution can benefit Setting up EduRole. Installing EduRole in your institution Training your staff Extending EduRole EDUROLE www.edurole.com [email protected] 01/04/2014 Version 2.1.4

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Page 1: EduRole - Getting Started

GETTING STARTED THE EDUROLE PLATFRORM

MANAGEMENT MANUAL

Welcome, this is the managers manual to the EduRole Student

Information System. This manual will help you set up your

institutions student information system and serves and an

introduction to the project.

How your institution

can benefit

Setting up EduRole.

Installing EduRole in

your institution

Training your staff

Extending EduRole

EDUROLE

www.edurole.com

[email protected]

01/04/2014

Version 2.1.4

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EduRole – Getting Started 2014 / Page 2

1. How your institution can benefit

EduRole is a Dutch non-for-profit aiming to strengthen the education sector by

improving information access and management within developing countries. To enable

institutions to manage the growing information needs in today’s education system a

Student Information System stands at the foundation of our services.

With the help of local Research and Education Networks (NREN) EduRole has been

able to support institutions in Zambia and is currently expanding its footprint across

Africa fast.

EduRole offers a full service platform for digital student information management, a so

called Student Information System (SIS). The EduRole platform is designed with

colleges and universities in mind, however could also be implemented in primary and

secondary education (K-12).

Originally designed for universities in Zambia (central Africa), EduRole is able to run

on a wide array of systems and has a low footprint, yet high performance. EduRole is

built to be implemented with the greatest ease, no matter the level of ICT expertise.

EduRole works together with other popular academic solutions to create a central

platform that integrates all services with single-sign-on (SSO). EduRole even has the

option to enable webmail using Roundcube directly in the system. To allow for easy

identity management of students, EduRole can connect with LDAP to automatically

manage institution wide user accounts for all systems such as email, VLE, or computer

access.

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2. Installing the EduRole Student Information System

Installing EduRole is easy. We have developed a simple installation process to guide

you through the needed settings.

Server Requirements

We recommend the use of Ubuntu Linux on your server however this can be any

operating system capable of running Apache, PHP5 and MYSQL.

In terms of hardware EduRole is a lightweight system that needs little hardware in

order to be able to run. We recommend a system configuration with at least:

Recent dual or quad core processor 2ghz+ (Xeon, I5, I7 or recent AMD)

2GB RAM

For the storage of information we recommend at least a RAID-1 setup of 250GB+ to

ensure the safety of your disks always ensure that both disks are operational. If you

are not able to run a RAID level setup please ensure a redundant system or

continuous backup solution to prevent data-loss.

3. Setting up EduRole

This short chapter will show your institutions ICT heroes how to install EduRole in

your institution. In case you don’t have any ICT employees around, get in touch with

us, we offer non-profit support to most countries. Through your local research and

education network (NREN) we can organize training and help you and other

institutions benefit.

EduRole has the following dependencies:

PHP dependencies: php5-ldap, php5-imap, php5-gd

Apache dependencies: mod_rewrite

3.1 EduRole on Windows XP/Vista/7/8 or Windows Server

For Windows users you can setup Apache, PHP5 and MYSQL with XAMPP a simple

solution containing all the software you need:

https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html

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3.2 EduRole with a new Ubuntu installation.

You can pick your operating system of choice and install Apache, PHP5 and

MYSQL, for Linux we recommend using Ubuntu (preferably server and LTS version)

a short tutorial for a full server setup:

1. Download Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server

2. Install on a system of your liking. (remember to setup networking)

3. Set a root password and become root:

a. sudo passwd root

b. su

4. Install required packages, remember the mysql password you enter:

a. apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 php5 php5-mysql mysql-server php5-

imap php5-gd

5. a2enmod rewrite

6. Setup your vhost or keep the default:

a. nano /etc/apache/sites-enabled/000-default

7. Ensure this file contains the following:

<Directory /var/www/>

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews

AllowOverride All

Order allow,deny

allow from all

</Directory>

8. service apache restart

9. cd /var/ww/

10. wget https://github.com/EduRole/edurole/archive/master.zip

11. unzip master.zip

12. mv edurole-master edurole

13. Open your web browser and visit your server.

14. http://serverip/edurole

15. Follow the system installer, under the MySQL settings enter:

a. root

b. enter the password you entered at step iv.1.

c. pick a name for your database: edurole

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4. Managing EduRole

Access Management

EduRole features a full access control system to manage access to each of the systems

available functions. To manage access it is important to first define the roles and groups

we have in our organization.

Setting up User Roles

To set up user roles we enter the Permission Management function under the

Administrators menu. User roles are the various levels within your organization throughout

which privileges are separated. For example:

Academic Office.

Would define a role for all users employed in the academic office, however some

privileges might need to be separated from the basic academic office employees so

we also define a role

Registrar’s Office

Within this role we can separate functional privileges from the basic academic office.

We can manage roles under the submenu “Role Management”.

To add a new role press the “Add New Role” item and enter the name for the new role

that you wish to define .After we have defined the role we are able to go to user

management and assign a user this role.

To be able to share access to

certain system functions we

need to define groups, these

groups consist of multiple

roles. A user is connected to a

role but is shown menu’s for

the group the role is a part of.

If you create a role you

automatically also create a

group with the same name. If

you wish to give access to a

certain function to multiple

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roles you can define a group that contains these roles.

By default the system contains a number of groups:

The group “Staff” contains all roles with a user access level (an access level higher

than 100)

The group “Students and Admitting Students” contains the role “Students” as well

as Admitting Students.

The group “Everybody” contains ALL roles even none authorized users. (role 0)Under

the system settings menu the administrator is able to setup each of the systems

available functions.

Managing access to specific functions

System management is divided in three segments:

1. Access Management

2. Block Management

3. Translation Management.

Under the Access Management panel the administrator can define the basic title and

description for each of the available views, these are visible by default. Each view has a

required permission dropdown, using this setting you can define the group who has

access to the view.

Menu Management

EduRole features a dynamic menu structure, you are able to define a menu position for

each view the system has. This means that any function that the system has can be added

to the menu for easy access.

Menu blocks are named after the group that the user is in. Only the members whose role

is part of the group will see the menu specific to their role. To show all students the “Show

Accommodation Information” view we can select the group “Students” to be the required

permission for this function. After which you can enter a number to the menu field at the

end of the function. The number of the function represents the relative placement in the

menu, meaning that if you want function x to be first in the menu and function y second,

you would define x as 1 in the menu field and y as 2 in the menu field. Extending EduRole

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Extending EduRole

To extend EduRole developers can build their own function modules to replace, extend or

build functionality in the system. EduRole uses a model view controller system to

implement functionality.

The main system is located in the “system” directory, inside of this directory a number of

directories are present, the “views”, “forms”, “services” and “classes”

The system core classes are located inside of the system directory itself, EduRole utilizes

its own framework to be able to be as light as possible and allow for easy development by

new PHP developers. Let’s make an example module for attendance monitoring.

First we will need to create a new view in the views directory, the file will need to have the

same name as the class. In this case call the filename: “attendance.view.php”. We can

make this a new file or we can copy the “example.view.php” skeleton view class located

in the views directory. The class will need to have a configuration function to set

component dependencies and if required JavaScript or CSS required by your module.

The class configuration is not mandatory from Edurole v2 onwards but it is still

recommended because it makes development easier. Edurole knows automated view and

service routing. Meaning that by default ALL your public functions in a view are accessible.

The routing principle is quite simple and utilizes the following URL key:

www.site.com/edurole/modulename/functionname/item/subitem

If you have created the “attendance.view.php” and created a public function called

“manageAttendance” you will be able to access this function as such:

www.site.com/edurole/attendance/manage/