16 July 2011, 10:15

Is there a way of creating a template journal for students to copy, so that each time they start a new post they can write it under several headings (given in the template provided by the tutor)  without them having to copy and paste in from a word document each time? 

In Moodle you could type in questions which appeared each time the user began a new post! 

17 July 2011, 2:15

Hello Angela,

This is not possible in Mahara. The journal resides in the student's own space and only when he wishes to make it available through a page can it be shared.

However, there is a work around that you could try if you know all your questions at the beginning of a course in which you use journals with your students:

1. Create a journal under your own name. If you can't create a new journal, enable multiple journals in "Settings". Y
2. Create a blog post for each question you wish your students to answer.
3. Choose the block "Journal" to display your entire journal in a page.
4. Before closing the popup, choose the option "Others will get their own copy of your Journal" from the "Block copy permissions" drop-down menu.
5. Share this page with your students and mark it as copyable (under Advanced Options on the Share page).
6. Ask your students to enbable multpile journals.
7. Ask your students to copy the page into their portfolio. They will now have your journal with the questions for the individual journal posts.

There are a couple caveats with this method:

• You will always see your post creation date and not when the student added something.
• You can't add more blog posts once the students have copied your journal. If they copy it again, a new journal is created in their account.

Cheers

Kristina

17 July 2011, 7:17

Gavin Henrick gave a presentation at the 2010 imoot showing how Enovation had altered the Mahara code to enable at least 3 different weblog templates for reflection for the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.

The solution meant that the College could apply its standardized reflection templates from its paper-based CPD processes to its eportfolio.

Check out his slides here:

http://www.slideshare.net/ghenrick/a-case-studies-presentation

(slides 11-19)

I think there was some discussion at that time about how to incorporate the code into future versions of Mahara, but I don't know what happened to that. I for one would be pretty interested in seeing something like that today with the Journal tool.

17 July 2011, 15:00

Hello Don,

Thank you for the link. This is the first time that I have seen this presentation and learnt of the adapted journal. I don't think they have contributed it back. I could not find any mention of it in the forums either (unless I used obscure keywords). It would be great to see this in action.

Cheers

Kristina

12 August 2011, 20:30

Hi Angela and Don,

I saw Gavin at the MoodleMoot NZ at the end of July and took the opportunity to ask him about it. He's not with Ennovation anymore. He said the code was written for an early Mahara version. At that time it was not added to Mahara by the then core developer team.

If you wish to see this feature added and others agree with you, you could ask Ennovation if they were willing to make their code available. However, somebody would have to update it to work with the current version of Mahara. It would probably be best to include this as a plug-in that can be enabled or disabled on a site level like a lot of the other features of Mahara.

Cheers

Kristina