23 December 2008, 1:44

Hi,

I hate to bring up this subject within an open source project, but here goes. How could I set up a Mahara powered site to make money (or to at least pay for hosting fees)?

I like the model where you provide a basic level of features for free and offer premium features for a fee. So, is there a way for the site admin to set up different levels of features for the users? If nothing else the admin could manually change the user's status if they purchased a premium package.

I have a Moodle site that uses aMember to control user authentications and course enrollments. Maybe there would be a way to control Mahara feature access from within Moodle.

23 December 2008, 2:31

The model that MyPortfolio works on is to charge institutions who want to join a fixed price per number of students they want in the system. This works well in an educational context, and is probably applicable elsewhere When you have individual users coming into the system without an affiliation, that system won't work though.

You could make users accounts expire unless they pay for them to continue. Or you could integrate advertising, that may be enough to pay for hosting.

Mahara doesn't inherently have any kind of generic roles system which will mean you'll have to write your own code to limit functionality. There are "staff" type roles but they probably don't give users anything significantly more interesting to be worth paying for.

I have no idea what aMember is sorry.

24 December 2008, 13:08

I suppose I need to install Mahara on my server and work with it more so I can get a better feel for how it works before I get too deep into the commercial side of it. I need to get a better grasp of the "Institution" model. I was thinking more of offering individuals the opportunity to start an account on a Mahara powered site.

 I have a Moodle site digitalliteracyproject.com that serves a niche market of automotive service personel. I can see how I could offer a Mahara site to this same niche group. I could use it as an add-on to my exsisting Moodle site, or have it as a stand alone site.

Ultimately it would be good to have the key features set up with some type of group permissions scheme so you could offer different levels of membership to different groups. Once this functionality is in place a third party ecommerce script could likely be used to offer memberships to different groups.

 aMember is a membership script. I use it now to control my Moodle installation. You use the core software with plug-ins to control a given site. Often the owner of aMember can be convinved to write a plug-in. A seasoned php coder can write their own plg-in according to this page from the aMember docs.

I know there is a lot of effort in getting Mahara rolled out and it is probably too early to put any significant efforts into making it ecommerce friendly, but at some point this may be more relevant to the maturity of the project.

 Thanks 

28 July 2009, 1:50

I know this post is a bit old, but I thought I'd chip in my two cents worth.

Fair point Nigel about charging institutions to have a certain number of Mahara accounts, but everything I see at the moment in terms of potential clients wanting to use Mahara indicates that they want to break away from the institutional ownership of their ePortfolio and have it something that they can manage themselvesfor the long term. This would seem to make an e-commerce capability within Mahara a perfectly sensible thing to have to break the institutional 'chains' that are necessary within an LMS.

The LEAP import/export capabilities that Nigel & Co are working on are a huge step in the right direction (and will overcome the most awkward question I currently get asked when being quizzed by potential clients about why they should use Mahara in their University), but an ePortfolio still needs to be hosted somewhere if it is to be used to reflect lifelong learning, so again back we come to the idea of learners being able to buy their own space.

My thoughts only, and I may well be in a minority :)

Mark.

28 July 2009, 15:35

Actually, I'm not convinced you are. I know of one or two other people who are looking into this at the moment - including someone who may contribute code back to us about this. As with all these things, nothing is certain but something good might happen soon

ps: for the record, I don't think adding functionality to charge users is particularly 'evil' or 'against the philosophy' of Mahara. Seems fair enough that people should have to pay a nominal fee for hosting if they're not associated with an institution.

28 July 2009, 16:19

It's a challenging area because I'm not convinced individuals would pay for separate user accounts given all the tools available on the net. There's still other models available. For example, a citizen eportfolio service might be sponsored by local, regional or central government. A sector wide service for education might be sponsored by an education department rather than individual schools (see www.myportfolio.school.nz) Similarly industry or professional bodies might support the ePortfolio service. Then there's the Google ads route. Personally I'm not convinced an e-commerce accounts approach would fly but more than happy to be proved wrong by someone. 

10 August 2009, 1:29

Hi all,

 We are a commercial Mahara host, http://www.foliospaces.com based on a free model. I work at the University of Ballarat, and the whole idea of students producing a portfolio that they couldn't take with them seemed crazy so we started Foliospaces. We do have a couple of Institutional users which pays the bills, but long term we hope that once students can export from their institutions, we will also be a destination for individuals (who will be encouraged to pay a small amount for premium services).

Successful 'free' models are elusive on the web, but I am proud to say we are already more profitable that Twitter or Facebook (they just have a few more users!!). That we are in the black though is exciting and our community continues to grow. Most universities are in a no-mans land or IT desert, locked in by firewalls, student authentication issues and administrivia. We now have a number of universities using Foliospaces as a 'cloud' site so they can network and form groups across the world, based on community, rather than enrolment status. As documentation of professional competencies enters the workplace more and more, there will be commercial demand there too. We are currently doing work with health services.

Working with Mahara every day, I am learning constantly, mainly from our own users.  At the moment we feel that the Foliospaces community is sharing so many experiences and so much knowledge, we are more focussed on growth of the free users than commercial. Our co-founder Steve and I would love to make a living from Foliospaces one day, but we are not holding our breath as we like to work with individuals and smaller institutions, helping them develop pedagogy.

I have had a few web based businesses, but none as exciting as this. We have users from most countries, and from a huge range of backgrounds. Clicking on random profiles is like an international holiday (the only one I am likely to get). I also find the Mahara community amazing and am regularly overwhelmed by the generosity of people. 

Please visit Foliosapces. We feel that we share the Mahara commitment to community and time will tell if people consider our service good enough to pay for. Unlike Rupert Murdock I believe that 'free' is here to stay on the web, and people will only pay for honest added value. That doesn't include newspapers, but I think it will include Mahara.

 

Cheers, Ian Knox

21 August 2009, 6:31

Intererestin Model, indeed.

Ian, i noticed that you have set up a free/premium membership model. The topic of the initial question of (not only) this thread was how to set up such a model technically, especiallay the question of user privileges. 

Maybe it would help a lot if people who already have done this could contribute their solutions, maybe as kind of case studies. Are You willing to provide more details?

 

Thanks

 

Beate

22 August 2009, 8:08

 

Hi Beate,

I am not sure that theFoliospaces model will be much use to you but I will try to explain. Basicallywe are a free Mahara host. We are interested in promoting the use ofePortfolios via Mahara software for all. As such we have few limitations.Anyone can set up a group, share a view etc.  We would like a folderstructure so we could have views for members to copy in their own area but thatwill come in time. We had advertising on views and we intended to remove itfrom views of premium members, but there were technical issues - they were onlyremoved when logged in; public views still had ads. As a result we removed allads even from free accounts. I didn't like them anyway :-) User privilages should not be confused with Mahara features. That was our original thinking but now I am thinking beyond the square. 

We have a couple ofinstitutional users now, but we offer a budget service. We have been asked forhigher level services with all sorts of performance criteria, but we can'tguarantee response times because of the possibility of congestion, which we don’thave control over. We can set up institutions that authenticate via LDAP. The main issue is that even if students are members of an institutionthey can still interact with any free members or members of other institutions.We see this as a positive thing and it is at the heart of the communities wewould like to see develop. On the other hand commercially I imagine highschools in particular may not want to use such an unregulated service and wouldbe better off running their own install or having a separate hosted install. Wewere asked to do this for one institution but suggested they use one of themany commercial providers (educational technology companies). It would not be adrama to host mind, it is just not a space where we want/need to be ideologicallyI guess. We applied to be a Mahara partner but were refused (I think) because we are notseen as a supplier.

So, back to our model.A rambling answer I know but it is still evolving. We charge just $2,000 for aninstitution with up to 1,000 users. So as I said it is budget, and for thatthey get admin rights, extra storage, customised look etc. It is enough to payfor our bandwidth. When students leave they revert to a free account. What wealso do however is work with our partners to develop suitable pedagogicalapproaches to the use of portfolios. This is on a consultancy basis andprobably for the first 12 months (this is our first year). They may revert back to the straight hostingafter that. We work with their students who in turn mentor other students andimportantly their teachers (who tend to be less IT savy than the students). Wealso help set up groups, provide help support, develop customised views and soon. 

We are also working todevelop views for professionals as well. In my State of Victoria(Australia)the Nurses Board has recently introduced CPD's or clinical professionaldevelopment and each nurse is expected to keep a portfolio. We are developingtemplates to help with this.

We are keen to haveprofessional (Premium) users as well and are looking at value add. Why would they pay forservice? We are developing a number of strategies. Some realistic some a bitwild at this stage. I want a 3D exhibition space and a 3D conference centre. Weare also looking at professional featured profiles, and affiliate and featuredadvertising, but in a separate space.

Free is the way of theweb and it is interesting but a lot of academics get a bit precious aboutanything seen as 'commercial', unless it is hosted in house when they are happyto pay a fortune for it. Many university IT departments are also controlfreaks, with no idea about pedagogy, but locked into their 'safe' proprietaryproducts. I have even seen them trying to make a great LMS platform like Moodle a gaol.

 Interestingly this is our little niche it seems, as we are gettingmany inquiries from academics wanting a small rogue hosting of Mahara sostudents and faculty can use Mahara across institutions. They could just usethe free service, or have a branded institution if they prefer. We are growingour membership everyday, and we intend to keep going for a few years thenprobably see where we are at. We expect a huge surge in membership oncestudents can export/import their portfolios. Rather than institutions worryingabout hosting graduates or alumni why not just send them to sites like ours?

My research interest isePortfolios so it is exciting to balance theoretical research with actionlearning. Now as a marketing lecturer I would also say our model is high risk.A much safer road would be to become an education technology company setting uplarge institutional hosting in house or on our severs. Look at Pebble Pad, orthe increasing number of companies offering Moodle and Mahara as an add on.Much more capital intensive, but much higher return and there would be theadvantage of being a Mahara partner. That model is not for us though as we notreally interested in software, our real interest is working with communitiesand helping institutions integrate portfolio practice into curriculum.  Our site still looks a bit daggy (strange Australian term!) but we don't want a corporate clinical look either. I doubt that I will be giving up my day jobany time soon.

 

Cheers, Ian

 

 

22 August 2009, 11:15

I'm actually currently working on a free/premium membership model with my Mahara install. I haven't done any coding for specific permissions yet, however. I did add an additional field in the usr table for the user level (we'll be offering free memberships and two premium options) and it is automatically set with free as the default upon registering.   The user's level is also set as a session variable when they log in.  I don't have a list of the exact changes I did, but from what I recall, it wasn't too difficult.

As for managing the user levels, you should use a payment processor that does recurring billing, such as CyberSource (or, if you want to go the low-budget route, PayPal also offers subscription billing). When a user upgrades to a premium membership and makes their payment successfully, the processor sends the info back to your site which you would use to automatically update the user's level.  When they cancel their membership or if their payment fails, the processor will send another bit of info back to your site when their current paid time period has expired, which tells your site to cancel their membership or downgrade them to free (depending on how you code your site).   Trying to manage a paid membership plan without a payment processor that automatically rebills people is extremely difficult and can lead to all sorts of problems.  Just be sure to go with a reputable company that has been around quite a while. I had a payment processor go out of business and they took the $5,000 they owned me in subscription payments with them (this was from another commerical web site I previously operated).

Overall, it's not incredibly difficult to set the whole thing up, as long as you can code PHP or hire someone who can.