ELIS Common Mistakes
Testing ELIS
One essential part of getting started is to try out new settings and features you would like to use with test accounts. A common mistake users make is to test features they want their students, teachers, instructors, etc. to use, with administrator accounts.
This can lead to confusion, as even if you are enrolled in a class as a student or teacher, if your account is an administrator, you still have all of your administrator view of the system, and can see and do many things that non-administrator users can't see.
A recommended method for testing and trying out new features is to set up 'fake' accounts, and use one account for each role you would like to test. This lets you try out all the settings, etc. as a user in that particular role. These roles also help when you are supporting your teachers and/or students as you can login as one of your fake users and see how the gradebook, messaging, learning plan, etc. are viewed by users in that particular role.
This is also important when trying out reporting features, so you can see how changes a user makes affect the data, etc.
Changing ID Numbers
ELIS uses the ID Number as the unique personal identifier for all users. This lets ELIS keep track of user data, grades, logs, course completions, etc. even when the user's name, email, or other personal information changes. Thus if a user gets married and changes their name, ELIS still 'knows' who they are. If a user changes their email, department, organization (so long as they are still on the same ELIS site) the ID Number is used to maintain the record of their information.
Thus it is an essential part of using ELIS to makes sure that ID Numbers do not change. Some customers have ID Numbers for users in their other systems, these can be synched to ELIS via Data Hub, upload users, LDAP, etc. However, if this ID Number might change in your other system, then that number should not be used for the ELIS ID number. ELIS has a Custom Fields interface that can be used to create custom user profile fields - these fields can be then used to store personal information that changes (in addition to the standard User Profile information - first name, middle name, last name, email, etc.)
