U SER G ROUP AND A CCOUNT A DMINISTRATION

ESDA has five types of pre-defined groups and three types of user accounts. For groups, they are System Group, Form Group, Class Group, Survey group, and Privilege Group. For user accounts, they are students and/or parents, teachers and administrators.

3.2.1 Introduction to Groups and User accounts

This section illustrates details of the pre-defined groups and user accounts.

A) Groups

The five types of groups are System Group, Form Group, Class Group, Survey group, and Privilege Group. All these pre-defined groups cannot be added or deleted. These five groups are used to help the Administrator to group a list of users with common properties. Each group includes its respective Chinese and English names, as well as a list of users. Except Survey Group, they all have privileges assigned.

“System Group” includes pre-defined user groups which cannot be added or deleted.

They are: 1) Administrator, 2) Teacher, 3) Student, 4) Parent and 5) Others.

“Form Group” is used to group students into forms. Schools can define Form Group according to the operating class levels. It includes a “CLASSLVL” code.

“Class Group” is used to group students into classes. Schools can define Class Group according to the operating class levels. It includes a “CLASSCODE” code. The relationship between classes (e.g. 1A) and forms (e.g. P1) can be built when adding or updating the classes.

Form Group and Class Group can be created through the web interface or created automatically through Excel file import. Codes (“CLASSLVL” and “CLASSCODE”) must be assigned to Form Group and Class Group of a particular school year.

“Survey Group” is used to group users with common properties (e.g. students with computers at home, and students without computers at home) for group comparison in a survey analysis. The resulting privilege(s) for each account is/are the aggregated privileges of all groups that the user belongs to. There are two types of survey groups. The Global Survey Group is created by the Administrator and can be used for respondents assigned by the Survey Manager when creating a survey. The Local Survey Group is created by the Survey Manager and can be used in a particular survey only.

“Privilege Group” is used to assign specific access rights to a list/group of users. The Administrator can create user groups with various combination of privileges assigned.

All the groups’ properties are summarised in the following table.

Group Type Group Type’s Properties Group Example

System Group

 It is inherited in ESDA system and cannot be created/ edited /deleted.

 When import batch students, parents and teachers accounts via Excel file, user

accounts will be automatically assigned into the respective system groups (i.e. students assigned to “Students” Group).

 Administrator Group

 Teacher Group

 Student Group

 Parent Group

 Other Group

Form Group

 When batch students accounts have been imported via Excel file, form group will automatically be created.

OR

The Administrator can manually create it.

 Form Name: Primary one

 Form Code: P1

Class Group

 When batch student accounts have been imported via Excel file, class group will automatically be created.

OR

The Administrator can manually create it.

 Class Name: 1A

 Class Code: 1A

Survey Group

 There are two types of Survey Groups:

Global Survey Group and Local Survey Group

 Global Survey Group(s) is/are created by the Administrator in User Management Module, in which Global Survey Group can be assigned to all surveys.

 Local Survey Group(s) is/are created by the Survey editor, in which the Local Survey Group will be attached to a particular survey for result analysis purpose.

 It is created to facilitate standardised survey respondents retrieval and survey results analysis across years

 Global Survey Group:

Pilot Students, Science Subjects Group, Arts Subjects Group

Privilege Group

 It is manually created by the Administrator.

 It is created to assign privileges to a group of users.

 Privilege Group:

Survey Creators, Survey Item Bank Administrators

Table 3.3 Group Type’s Properties

B) User Accounts

In the ESDA, there are three types of user accounts. They are students and/or parents, teachers and administrators. To create student and/or parent user accounts, the Administrator can import the Student users from WebSAMS or create them in the ESDA system. To create teacher user accounts, the Administrator can import teacher user accounts from spreadsheet or create them in the ESDA. To create administrator user account, the Administrator can create it in the ESDA.

3.2.2 Group Planning Strategy

Planning of grouping strategy in ESDA will streamline administration. This section presents the guidelines for implementing survey groups and privilege groups.

A) Survey Group Planning

The Administrator is advised to set up survey group for a particular survey (e.g. 1A Intranet System Usage) and add the appropriate user accounts (e.g. 1A Student User Accounts) to the survey group. This can facilitate cross group (e.g. 1A and 1B) and time (e.g. Intranet usage survey for 1A between 12-March-2017 and 12-April-2017) comparison for survey analysis.

B) Privilege Group Planning

The Administrator is advised to create privilege group(s) based on resource access needs.

For example, creating a privilege group with survey item bank management rights for the Survey Manager, or creating a privilege group to manage school based attribute(s).

3.2.3 Account Policy Planning

The account policy determines how passwords should be used by user accounts. The account policy sets the requirements for:

 Password minimum length

 Password uniqueness

 Set the changing password authorization to each user type

To use an account policy to provide security for user accounts, the Administrator may consider the following:

 Define a minimum length for password. The longer the password, the higher the security level. In a medium security system, the recommended password length is 6-8 characters.

 Unique password for all user accounts.

Before a new school year starts, the Administrator needs to update student user accounts (Please refer to section 3.2.5). Within a school year, the Administrator may need to update student user account (e.g. a student is transferred from 1A to 1B).

If school has set up school-based Intranet system, the Administrator can replace the

“LOGINID” and “PASSWORD” column in the EXCEL file by the login name and password of the school-based Intranet. For detailed operation procedures, please refer to the Operation Manual.

3.2.4 Add, Edit and Delete Groups and Users Accounts

The Administrator can add, edit and delete Groups and User Accounts. For detailed operation procedures, please refer to the Operation Manual.

3.2.5 Import User Accounts from WebSAMS

To facilitate the Administrator to create student accounts, a set of procedures is prepared for the Administrator to extract the student accounts from WebSAMS. For detailed procedures, please refer to the Operation Manual.

When importing user accounts from the EXCEL file, the system will perform the following tasks: 1) add new user accounts, 2) update existing user accounts, 3) delete existing user accounts, and 4) create Class Groups (forms and classes). The system uses the registration number to compare user accounts between/among existing user accounts in the database and the user information in the EXCEL file. Detailed descriptions of the tasks are as follows:

1) There is a user in the EXCEL file but there is no existing user account with the same registration number in the database. The system creates a new user account with the data in the EXCEL file. (Add a new user account)

2) There is a user account in the database as well as a user in the EXCEL file with the same registration number. The system updates the user account in the database with the data in the EXCEL file. The class and form are also updated (class promotion) according to the user information in the EXCEL file. (Update an existing user account)

3) There is a user account in the database but no user data in the EXCEL file with the same registration number. Then the system removes the user account from the database.

(Delete an existing user account)

4) The system creates Class Groups (forms and classes) if the Class Groups do not exist in the specific school year. The system creates Class Groups according to the

“CLASSCODE” and “CLASSLVL” in the EXCEL files. It uses the “CLASSCODE” and

“CLASSLVL as the Chinese names, English names, and codes of the Class Groups. The system compares the current school year and the code in the Class Group and creates new Class Groups if the codes do not exist in the database. The codes in the Class Groups are used to prevent duplicated creation of Class Groups in the same school year. For example, if the school year is “2017-18” and there is a Class Group with a code “1A”, when the Administrator imports a 2017-18 school year EXCEL file with “1A” in “CLASSCODE”

field, the system will not create a Class Group “1A”.

3.2.6 Privilege Setting

To set privileges for user groups, the Administrator can click “Set Privilege” button next to the target user group (Fig 3.13) and then check the privileges to be assigned to the target user group and click “Save” button (Figure 3.14).

Figure 3.13 Set Privilege

Figure 3.14 Privilege setting

3.2.7 Best Practices

To minimize tedious jobs of ESDA group(s) and user accounts creation, the Administrator is recommended to use the “batch user account creation” to create student accounts, parent accounts and all school-based-group(s) (e.g. class and form groups). For detailed procedures, please refer to the Operation Manual.