08 September 2009, 0:12

We're looking forward to outcome tracking - that one feature would blow away all other eportfolio competitors for us.

http://wiki.mahara.org/Developer_Area/Tracking_Outcomes

08 September 2009, 1:07

19 September 2009, 23:41

Great to hear, Nigel !

I've been kicking around 1.2b3 and for the life of me I can't find outcome tracking.  Hopefully some docs show up in the users guide :)  Some sysadmin guides about the Moodle plugin would be dandy, too.

Thanks for a super job - Mahara looks good !

20 September 2009, 15:33

Richard Mansfield has told me that actually, the Mahara side isn't in core just yet. My mistake!

I'm sure he knows where it is though, and how it works. I'll point him at this topic today. 

20 September 2009, 18:06

The Moodle side of this is an assignment type that allows students to submit a Mahara view to be graded as an assignment in Moodle. 

Unfortunately the Moodle assignment type side of this wouldn't work without some patches to the Moodle core, which I was unable to get accepted into Moodle.  I didn't want to add it on the Mahara side if it wasn't going to work with Moodle.  However, I've just rewritten the Moodle side as two separate plugins which only require a much smaller patch to core, and I think I'll be able to convince someone to apply that.

But none of this stuff is likely to become part of core Moodle or Mahara in a hurry.  To set this up, administrators will have to go through a convoluted process:

• Set up a Moodle/Mahara pair with SSO from Moodle -> Mahara
• Install two extra plugins on the Moodle site: a module and an assignment type
• Install a separate artefact plugin on the Mahara side.

 Once I know for sure how this is going to work, I'll upload the plugins and post more detailed instructions.

16 November 2009, 19:17

03 February 2010, 6:24

Dear Richard,

Thank you for this development.

I have installed the different components and I am able to create an ePortfolio assessment and students can choose Mahara's views from Moodle to be assessed.

I have a question and a few little probems:

1) It seems that the view sent by student for assessment is not blocked and students can continue to modify the view. This is not important in formative assessment but is big issue for summative assessement. I am doing something wrong?

2) The "Outcomes" menu does not appear along side the orther menus in the "My portfolio". The plu in is installed from the "Plug-in menu".

3) When a view has been assessed where do go the teacher's remarks? In the documention on the wiki it states that students receive them in their Mahara. 

Regards,

-dajan

03 February 2010, 17:02

Dominique-Alain,

1. You are probably not doing anything wrong.  When a view is submitted, the link to edit the view from "My Views" should disappear.

However, Mahara's 'locking' of views is very limited and only really covers the layout, block configuration and view metadata. Any artefacts that students have placed within the view can still be modified.  For some blocks this doesn't matter much.  For example, the contents of files linked to by the file blocktypes cannot be modified because files cannot be replaced in Mahara (although they can be deleted).

In other blocks such as the blog and blogpost, the contents can change even when the view is locked, because the user can still modify their blog from the 'My Blogs' page, and Mahara just displays the current contents of the blog in the view.  Nigel & I have thought a bit about how to create frozen revisions or copies of artefacts at the time a view is submitted, but although this feature would be nice to have, it's a lot of work and it's not on our current list of priorities.

2. The Outcomes menu is not displayed for a student until they have at least one outcome attached to one of their views.  This doesn't happen until a teacher has marked one of their submitted views in Moodle and attached outcomes to it.

3. The teacher's comments are saved in Moodle and never transferred to Mahara.  It's only the outcomes that are copied to Mahara, and this is really just a backup of information that is stored in Moodle, for the user's convenience.  It doesn't add any important functionality on the Mahara side.

From http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=1280:

"the Outcomes artefact plugin isn't really necessary to get this feature going at all.  It was a requirement of the client that funded this work, but we were reluctant to include it in Mahara, because Mahara is not an application that is intended to be used for assessment purposes.

All you gain from the outcomes plugin is the ability for users to look at the outcomes that were attached to their views when they were graded in Moodle."

03 February 2010, 18:24

Thank you Richard for the time you spent responding my previous post. It will help me during my conferences to answer to recurrent questions about evaluation.

Although to freeze artefacts is not in your priorities and represents a lot of work, it is an essential feature for Mahra to dessiminate as a professional tools for presenting and evaluating students' work. 

Regards,

-dajan