Entitlements

From ETS

The term entitlements refers to the Penn State courses a particular user is an affiliate with. A listing of these entitlements/courses, for a particular user, can be found via their LDAP entry. People wanting to use iTunesu with their courses, can only do so with the courses contained in their current entitlement listing.

Entitlements and iTunesu

iTunesu uses only a portion of the entitlement string, to serve as the identifier, for each course when created. Here is a sample entitlement string returned from PSU's LDAP:

URN:PSU.EDU:COURSE:UP:STAT200:102:098345:AFFILIATE

Now here is the portion used by iTunesu as the course identifier during course creation:

UP:STAT200:102

Entitlements are also used to control what a user can and can't administrate within the iTunesu for PSU site. So in summary a user's entitlements are used to:

• control access and
• create courses in iTunesu

Entitlements and our Interface

Our interface makes use of a user's entitlements in two places:

• the newpodcast.cgi page and

  * displays a list of entitlements which have not had courses created in itunesu for, to select and make courses for them

• the first time a user has his/her courses cached

  * need to perform showtree xql query for user courses

and its value is stored in the <identifier> xml tag within the created course xml node