Usernames and Account Deletion

Version: Kora Courses, October 26, 2023 or later

Permissions required: Administrator

• Usernames must be unique across all the accounts at your school. In order to re-use a username that already belongs to a user, you must first set their username to something else.
  
  
• Once a student's account has been deleted, their username is available again. However, part of the Digication philosophy includes the hope that alumni will continue to use the software after graduation, and the benefit of keeping their classwork available to teachers, administrators and accreditors during the internal school evaluations and initiatives of subsequent years. This is not possible if student accounts are deleted regularly, so we have several options that we offer instead of the ability to delete user accounts. 
  
 
  
  1. A user can be added to the Alumni group to indicate that they are no longer a current student.
  2. A user can be marked deactivated to prevent them from logging in again. 
  3. For schools using Single Sign On, a user can be set up with a Digication-managed username and password, so that their record can be safely removed from the SSO source (usually LDAP).

In all of the above cases the user continues to render their username unavailable for use by other accounts. If your school does not generate permanently-unique usernames for each new student (a.k.a. reassigns, or recycles usernames), you will need to choose from the following options:

1. Generate and manage permanently unique usernames for your users' Digication accounts. (If the rest of your schools electronic resources use a recycled username, this has the disadvantage of confusing the user, since they need to remember two sets of login information).
   
   
2. Release usernames upon graduation by assigning new usernames to the accounts of graduating students according to an alternate scheme, to allow current students to use the recycled usernames that match their other school account(s). This can be as simple as appending the year of graduation to the username of the graduating student, and notifying users at the login page with a message like: "If you are an alumni, we may have changed your username to include your year of graduation - i.e. john.smith2011"

We also offer schools the option of creating a test ("sandbox") system in parallel to their real system, where your IT staff can test new methods of integration or get a preview of upcoming Digication features. If you would like us to create a sandbox system simply email support@digication.com.