25 March 2010, 7:08

Hi,

 i am a student and just installed Mahara on my University server. I am still new in Mahara or any ePortfolio or Learning Management System.

My questions are:

a. Why we choose Mahara and not the other? like Moodle for example?

b. What is the advantage of using Mahara that not available on another system? 

for example we could also store and share on Google Docs (or perhaps Google Wave) but why Mahara? is there  any plus point?

Thanks a lot for any input!

 Afrizal

25 March 2010, 8:52

Hello,

in a meeting with Martin d. he told us that Moodle and mahara are siters. They support each other. 

Moodle is a LMS and there ore teacher centric as Mahara is a E-Portfolio system and therefor lerner centric

While there a mamy ways to do portfolio work only a few systems and less opensourcew systems allow a user protected work. Here the users decided which artfacts to show, to which audiance, in which timeframe with a good layout.

Cheers Heinz

25 March 2010, 10:27

How if Mahara compared with Trac system for project management tools? how can we hold on Mahara?

Dont get it wrong, i use mahara but just want to know the comparison with the other systems so that it could complete my documentation.

 Thanks

25 March 2010, 11:10

Hello Afrizal,

As Heinz has mentioned,  Moodle and Mahre are a sort of "cousins" (indeed, some  of the development team of Mahara were also involved in some major Moodle development) and therefore, it is easy and straightforward -as well as cheap- for Moodle educators to integrate Mahara as eportfolio for assessment.

However that doesn t mean that Mahara is the only platform available in the market. It depends very much on what you want the eportfolio tool for and who and how is going to use it. My experience as a learning technologist is that, even in the same institution, there may co-exist different eportfolio plaforms. I personally recommend to use Wordpress Mu and BuddyPress (you got the weblog portfolio and the social networking site) if you dont want to use your eportfolio stand-alone (that is not, not integrating with Moodle).

On the other hand, if you are an European and you want to use Europass, Mahara got a pluggin for exporting your portfolio as Europass xml template.

With regard to Google Wave, it is still in too early stages to be used as a professional portfolio. At least, this is general opinion in the UK.

Google Apps also works fine with Moodle and there is an integration pluggin develioped by MoodleRooms.

Regards

Mari

26 March 2010, 4:19

Thanks a lot Heinz and Mari for the feedback!

 I am still open for any input about the reason 'Why we choose Mahara?'

BR,

Afrizal