The status of informed consent is tracked in the STUDENT_STATE table in the database, with model='client'. The properties consent-dialog & informed-consent are used to track status for each user and section.
The property consent-dialog sets the consent form for a section or user; consent forms are stored as *.html files in the review directory. The value for this property normally contains the name of the *.html file. If consent-dialog is undefined, then the student is never shown a consent form.
The property informed-consent specifies the status for a particular student or section. If the student clicks on a consent form, then the result is recorded in informed-consent as agree:_name_ or disagree:_name_, where _name_ is specified in the associated HTML file. If consent has been given externally to Andes, this can be specified as external:_name_.
To create a consent form for a new section, create a new file in the review directory, using review/consent-asu.html as a model. Start up lisp and do the following to use that form for a given section:
(rhelp) ;load help system
(andes-database:create) ;open database connection
;; Use form my-consent.html for section my-section:
(andes-database:set-state-property "consent-dialog" "my-consent.html"
:model "client" :section "my-section" :student nil :tid t)
(andes-database:destroy)
If students have given consent externally for a section, this can be specified in the following manner:
(rhelp) ;load help system
(andes-database:create) ;open database connection
(andes-database:set-state-property "informed-consent" "external:my-form"
:model "client" :section "my-section" :student nil :tid t)
;; If a particular student has opted-out, it can be specified as:
(andes-database:set-state-property "informed-consent" "opt-out:my-form"
:model "client" :section "my-section" :student "bad-student" :tid t)
(andes-database:destroy)
The Andes database has a user account open which gives access only to anonymized data where informed consent has been given. The user open has access the tables OPEN_STUDENT_STATE and OPEN_PROBLEM_ATTEMPT which have anonymized user names and contain only users who have given informed consent.
Note that user names starting with x: or md5: are assumed to have already been anonymized. This allows user names to be encoded externally to Andes. Generally, this is a preferred method of anonymization since user names are then protected between the client and the Andes server.