09 April 2011, 20:53

I just wanted to provide a brief write up of my experience with the Mahara Virtual Appliance Chelsea School has developed.

A little bit about myself: I am a 15 year plus experience educator in a medium sized school division in Canada. We have about 20000 students. About 1000 Mahara accounts are active. In my leisure time, I have installed Mahara on shared hosting, VPS and a designated server. Professionally, an experienced sys admin Linux expert takes care off all my computer needs and wishes.

 Rik Goldman and his team of high school students are providing an exceptional service to the Mahara community. They have developed and released  a number of virtual machine appliances, amongst them Mahara. They have won international recognition and are actively developing more appliances. Their URL is http://9while9.com

Now, what does this all mean? Essentially, they are a team that is willing and capable of providing first class installation services of the Mahara system so that others may get started trouble free.

Let me explain: After my initial request was responded to within 24 hours, we quickly agreed on a path of action. Rick and his students developed the steps involved. I had an account at Amazon EC2. Rick communicated the exact commands they were going to run on the instance to me ahead of time. I agreed to them.  I handed root access over to Rick and his team.

When they were done, all I had to do with the Mahara install was pick up the step in which I had to agree to the license agreement and configure the admin account (please note the level of professionalism here). For piece of mind, I also changed root password for the server and the Postgres database as was suggested by the team.

Within 3 days I believe, I was in possession of a fully functional Mahara instance. Because it is an amazon deployed instance, I can scale it up to 20 servers at a time if I wanted to. How cool is that?

Who would benefit from this service Chelsea School is providing? It would be great for a department who wants to get started with eportfolios but does not want to wait for their IT to make the decision. It could be a group of teachers who want to run their own eportfolios. Maybe a school wants to try it out. The opportunities are endless. In my country, a comparable service starts at $3000. I was more then happy to contribute some financial support to Chelsea School’s scholarship fund.

In closing, what I got was a fully functional Mahara instance using postgres and it did not require extra work whatsoever. The setup was handled proofessionally. I received a scalable instance that I could increase to 20 simultaneous servers. That is more processing power then most school divisons I know have at their disposal. I also got complete piece of mind.

Most importantly perhaps, it gave me great pleasure knowing that students would have a chance to do authentic, real world work and that they gained a sense of accomplishment.  I can highly recommend the ISO-matic Appliances  and services Rik and his student team offer.