Feedback

I would like to share my personal comments and feedback on new Mahara 1.3.

After few days of playing around I noticed few changes which I tried to show on my brainstorming image:)

Don’t like themes, they look poor. will be possibility to change them- CSS

HOMEPAGE:

I really like an idea of home page where we can see latest activities and also edit what we want on home page such as adding recent posts, recent activity. In my opinion it will be much more easier to follow our friends (better collaboration if I have 50 friends-save a lot of time) and also for tutors to save time checking each students account. The bad thing about home page is that users can switch on/off information about Mahara ( still good to remind what is the aim of Mahara!!).

PROFILE:

I like that old preferred name for display name, display name is more understanding meaning when changing. Preferred name didn’t tell our students that their tutors will see them as for example King James or any other nicknames.

Good idea for cut down tabs under profile (moved them somewhere else).

I think the idea to organize my Resume into categorise make it more clear and giving quicker idea what can be there. It has more sense with small categorise.

MY PORTFOLIO:

Great idea that Profile Page has been moved to Views as in past our student were very confused with differences between My Views and Profile Page.  It is good that there are explanation for DashBoard and Profile View, as it gives an idea what it is.

I think that DashBoard is helpful to have better collaboration between all users (students, tutors, etc.). It saves a lot of time to see all latest activities on my friends pages, friends Views, groups, tutors pages, etc. I think it is nicer for tutors to follow large number of students (different then emails).

During editing access to View there 2 new option: moderate comments and allow comments. Not sure if it is good for student to enable moderating comments (what if View is as assessment?!). However it is good for tutors, if they want to create View with information for students and they do not want any feedback there.  

My Blogs: For few our students it might be confusing that if they want to have multiple blogs firstly they need to change settings. Might not work good with our students.

GROUPS:

I think there are a lot of changes here and feel like groups are becoming to be friendlier for members. I think editing HomePage inside group is great news for tutors as they decide what will be there and then they might want to add additional information for their members.

New option that we can change subject for our post reply gives students to add new main keys for discussion. As the students might create new important points for discussion and want to make them visible, or just name their post.

SETTINGS:

It is not easy to find where are settings (we have some users who are not literate in computers). Finally after clicking everything I found settings. Email enabled/disabled option is good as we have homepage and we can just log into Mahara. Don’t need to have emails notifications.

I don’t like an idea: hide name as sometimes tutors want to find students by their real names.

Change username. Can this be disabled?! Not good that students will change their students ID for nicknames…