28 October 2010, 7:38

We'd like to have one installation, with multiple schools each with distinct URLs.

One installation to facilitate networking across the schools, but with distinct URLs to retain the sense of affiliation with the student's school. 

We've got as far as one installation, with multiple URLs accessing the site, and can add students to the Institutions. Good so far.

Next requested feature is for the notifications to come from an email address appropriate for each school

IE, student in School A accesses mahara.schoolA.com (which works), and receives his notifications from [email protected]

student in School B accesses mahara.schoolB.com (which works), and receives hi notifications from [email protected]

Are there any school clusters out there running mahara already, and if so, how have you got around this?

I fear Mahara could become a victim of its ease-of-use. From 2 pilot classes I can sense usage increasing across the schools I work with - kids find it so easy to use!

Andy

28 October 2010, 9:11

Hi Andy,

We run Mahara for multiple schools - we currently have one installation with 114 schools/institutions connecting to it. Each school also has it's own Moodle and we use the XMLRPC/Moodle Networking to SSO users from Moodle to Mahara. Because of the scale of our installation, we've designed and developed a Walled Garden feature for Mahara which we're hoping to include in the next major version.

I'm afraid that I don't know of any way for notifications to come from a specific school. In many senses it doesn't make sense within Mahara. Whilst Moodle is all about teaching, Mahara is all about the user. It's very user-centric and a single user can belong to multiple institutions. It wouldn't make a huge amount of sense to send notifications from a specific e-mail for each school - at least in my opinion. Feel free to submit a wishlist item on the bug tracker if you really want this feature but I suspect that it would be low priority.

One thing I should point out is that Mahara doesn't really support having multiple URLs for the same Mahara - the examples you've given are to use

• mahara.schoola.com
• mahara.schoolb.com

However, Mahara (and Moodle for that matter) only supports having one wwwroot. If you start trying to use multiple wwwroots or change it around frequently, things will get complicated.

From our experience of running a large installation of Mahara for two UK LEAs, having one domain (http://mahara.cleo.net.uk) is more than sufficient for our needs. Schools log in via their own Moodle anyway.

Feel free to get in touch if you want more information,

Andrew

30 October 2010, 21:00

Hello Andy,

To add on to Andrew's post, in New Zealand we have myportfolio.school.nz and myportfolio.ac.nz - nationwide Mahara installations for schools to connect (.school) and tertiary institutions (.ac). The institutions connect to the service and also don't have a school-specific address. We like it that way because then the portfolio is not so tightly linked to a school, esp. as students are going to switch schools. Being on myportfolio.school.nz, they just need to remember that and not a school-specific address that will change for them multiple times during their school career.

Cheers

Kristina