Possible to clone other students' private workspaces

workspace
education
#1

Hi,

I’m currently evaluating Cloud 9 for use on a MOOC, with a use case of me (the teacher) creating a template workspace that all students will then clone in order to work on course assignments privately. The students would then individually let myself or other TAs join their private workspace to help as necessary but other than that, each student’s work would remain private to themselves.

I’ve noticed something that seems to be an unacceptable flaw in the process of students creating workspaces. It seems to be possible for a student to create a new workspace by cloning the workspace previously created by any other student. This new workspace is a complete replica of the original workspace file system. This is clearly unacceptable from a teaching and assessment perspective, as it allows any student to simply copy all of the work of another student by cloning a new workspace once that other student has completed an assignment.

I have noticed that it isn’t possible for students i.e. “members” to open each others’ workspaces, which is the behaviour I’d expect, although it’s still possible for a student to list all of the workspaces created within a team and, to be honest, I would not expect this list to be available to members either.

My question is: is the ability to clone any other member’s workspace the intended behaviour, is it a bug in the permissions model of Cloud 9, or have I missed some configuration that prevents members from cloning each others’ workspaces?

Thanks in advance,
Neill

#2

Just to clarify, I’m currently using the “Cloud9 IDE for Education” plan to create a “team” for the course, with students being invited to this team as members. My course template workspace has been created as “private” by an admin. The students/members are able to select this workspace to clone when creating their first workspace, and the cloned workspace is “private” for that student/member in the dashboard.

Thanks!

Education Plan FAQs
#3

Having the same issue here njp, my students can clone each others team private workspaces and even my team private workspaces which is not the behaviour I want to see. There should be some configuration setting where you can switch this on/off for members to prevent fraud. (for us to correct…)