18 November 2011, 12:32

Hello,

I'm an instructional technology specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, and was tasked with supporting our Mahara users. We have educators in the academic departments that handle the pedagogy, and my focus is on actually using the system.

As I was learning the system, I found it difficult to find detailed, up-to-date training resources (even the Mahara wiki user guide on this site is incomplete!). I even had a hard time finding consistent terminology. So, I decided to create my own. I developed a support center web page in our LMS, and included 6 tutorial videos, along with a number of step-by-step documents that cover more specific tasks. I add additional documents or "tips" every so often.

I would like to share this with the Mahara community: https://moodle.ucsf.edu/course/view.php?id=1603

If you check things out, please reply in this forum or send me an email with any feedback you may have! (You can't participate in the discussion forum on the support page, unfortunately.) My email is sean.mcclelland at ucsf dot edu.

I look forward to your comments!

18 November 2011, 13:37

Great job on the videos!

18 November 2011, 16:06

HI Sean:

These are really well organized, a great use of Camtasia and well supplemented with other materials. I actually like seeing the closed caption text as you speak...helps focus.

What are your plans for keeping them evergreen as Mahara evolves and new modules appear?

18 November 2011, 17:34

Thanks!

I have all the original Camtasia files, so I'll just to add to them, or edit/re-record as necessary. I tried to keep them short, and although they turned out longer than I had planned, they're still modular so I should be OK for a while.

20 November 2011, 15:06

Hello Sean,

These resources are great. I linked them on the User Tutorials page on the wiki.

Currently, I am in process of updating the Mahara user documentation. We moved it off the wiki as we are using reStructuredText and Sphinx to write the documentation. It now lives at http://manual.mahara.org

I put a link to it on the wiki page so that people will find it more easily.

For the new documentation I also wanted to incorporate screencasts etc. that others have created because some like yours are just great. I haven't gotten to that stage yet, but will go through tutorial resources and add links to others that are available, esp. screencasts.

You can also take the Mahara manual and change it so that it would fit UCSF. The manual lives at https://gitorious.org/mahara/manual and can be downloaded. The license is CC BY-SA.

Cheers

Kristina

28 November 2011, 11:35

I hadn't seen most of those other resources before, thank you for pointing them out!

06 December 2011, 8:35