22 December 2009, 12:25

Hello folks,

I offered myself a first test-installation of Mahara for Christmas last night - and although I installed it on a shared hosting it runs very smoothly :-) Good news so far.

Now I have my first newby-question concerning the internal profiles fields - I found out that I can make certain field mandatory or public via:

Plugin Administration: artefact: internal: profile

Ok so far. But what if I need to delete certain profile fields completely because they are not needed? Or even more: what can I do to add new profile fields.

The concrete idea: what I want to achieve is to give users the possibility to select their native language from a select box and to tick all spoken languages (and their levels) for example by using checkboxes. From the usability-point of view it would be even more comfortable to have a similar solution like on the Resumé-Page (e.g. for adding Certifications, Accreditations, and Awards or Employment History) to avoid hundreds of checkboxes on one page. So you could add a new spoken language by clicking on "add", then selec the spoken language from a select box and then the level (e.g beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert) from a second select box.

First of all: does this make sense to anybody? Can you follow my explanation?

And then: is my guess right that there is not yet a way to modify or add profile fields out of the box with mahara and that this is something difficult to achieve for a newby.

You help and advice is aprecciated.

Cheers,
Chris

23 December 2009, 3:42

I am currently working on that - that is: I am writing a plugin to integrate Europass with Mahara.

Europass includes those fields (mother tongue(s) and other language(s)). Please wait for some weeks or maybe a month to finish all things, polish it...

Maybe a screenshot can illustrate what I am trying to achieve, and give you an idea, if this is what you're asking for...

Cheers, Gregor

23 December 2009, 6:01

Wow Gregor,

I'm impressed. This is so much more than what I was looking for. Great idea to use the officiel Europass language skill levels (A1-C2). It will be an extremely usefull tool for any user especially in learning environments!

I can't wait to see this working live :-)))

Merry Christmas,
Chris

20 January 2010, 11:17

Hi,
very interesting !
I've also started support of Mahara Leap2a profile to export it in Europass CV standard. The online webservice (CVT) is already working in a 'beta' test version (http://cvt.eife-l.org).

The fact is that for the moment,  the main issue is that a user need first to download his/her Leap2a zip file localy, then extract it and upload the leap2a.xml file somewhere in order to call the CVT.
I will update it with a short online client that could directly upload the zip file and do transformation using one of the existing output available (HR-XML, Europass CV xml, PDF, ODT, Word...) but the best option would be to see a sharing feature directly in Mahara to share our Leap2a export using a URL (maybe with an additional parameters in order to avoid/manage public or private access)....
I'll keep you in touch once its done. Then I could focus on supporting also the Europass Language Portfolio part if the Leap2a resume export include specific related semantic information I could ue for XSL transformation using the CVT.

 Cheers,
Marc

26 January 2010, 3:54

I've finished writing Europass plugin to integrate Europass into Mahara.

More info and plugin download: http://mahara.org/view/view.php?id=9040

NB: This is not an official release, this is Release Canidate 1. I want opinion and feedback from the Community. Thanx! 

26 January 2010, 6:32

Thank you very much for that, Gregor.

As a matter of fact, I was in a meeting last monday with  a member  of  the Spanish Minister of Education, and we discussed how Mahara could suppor the Europass portfolio.

Have you developed the pluggin on your own or are you working with other European Universities or organizations?

I was thinking that maybe we can create an European group for leading this development and joining efforts (it is not a question of reinventing the wheel) , and maybe we could advertise it at the Europa Elearning portal.

 What do you think?

Regards

Mari

26 January 2010, 8:01

I've developed it on my own. But there could be some chance, we will use Mahara in our secondary schools in Slovenia - that's not decided yet.

Please test it and send me your opinion and feedback. Can I ask for your favor - could you check the translation to Spanish and complete it?

I agree with you on joining efforts...

Regards, Gregor

27 January 2010, 5:48

03 February 2010, 4:35

Hi Gregor,

very interesting. We also will test your module. Maybe translation into German will be our thing ...

Regards from Austria

Michael

03 February 2010, 5:17

...btw - one question:

how do you solve the problems with pagebreak? (f.e. one line of school-experience on the bottom and three lines on the top of the next page).

Regards

Michael