07 July 2012, 2:55

Hello,

The University of New South Wales (UNSW) contracted Catalyst IT to design a solution for Mahara which allows to utilize Moodle's LTI support for assignment submission and that archives submitted pages on the Mahara server for accountability purposes.

You can read the overview of the proposal at https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Developer_Area/Specifications_in_Development/Moodle_LTI_integration

and can leave comments here in the forum. If you are interested in co-funding this feature, please send me an email at [email protected] so I can put you in touch with the person responsible at UNSW.

Cheers

Kristina

16 July 2012, 1:46

Hi Kristina,

A couple of thoughts from UC:

• What can the student do with the archived version - i.e. can they keep it as showcase artefact in cases where e.g. they get a very high grade.
• Our staff want students to be able to continue editing and building their portfolios even after submission for assessment - so locking them is not seen as a desired behaviour.

It seems that the best arrangement would allow students to submit a portfolio page/collection for assessment and remain in control of their pages. The process is fair because the submitted snapshot would be seperate from the live portfolio and not editable by students after the due date. The snapshot of a portfolio that goes into Moodle could be a LEAP2a file and moodle could call Mahara API's for staff to view it. Grades and comments coud be added to the portfolio directly (for ease of use) and the graded portfolio could then be returned to a student as a LEAP2a file with grades and comments incorporated. Students could then upload the LEAP2a file and have both their graded showcase and their ongoing portfolio intact.

Cheers.

18 July 2012, 20:26

Hello Shane,

Thank you very much for your feedback. As far as I understood the requirements from UNSW, the students were not supposed to get a copy of the archived page. That page was only to be kept for administrative purposes by the university.

The locking of the page was to happen as it does at the moment because it can also be that the instructor gives feedback on the page and requests changes. Then the student continues working on that page after it has been released. The instructor could also leave feedback directly on the page or an artefact. If the snapshot were made before then I think that would not be possible as you would eseentially make a copy of the artefact / page.

In your scenario, a lot of files / artefacts would be doubled up because the student gets the evaluated portfolio as separate entity. What happens when he should just make a small adjustment? Does the student keep all versions of the artefacts and pages?

Your idea comes closer to the idea of being able to have versions of a portfolio, I think. With versioning (like in a wiki), you'd be able to revert to an older version and see how your portfolio developed over time without having to double everything and more up.

As for the API call to view a Leap2A file: I don't know if it is that simple. Normally, we have to create a new user to view Leap2A. So it always needs to be unpacked. We'd have to see if that could be done "on the fly" temporarily for just viewing.

Definitely things to ponder and I'll let UNSW know so they can also think about it.

Cheers

Kristina

18 July 2012, 21:09

Hi Shane, Kristina,

Thank you for letting me know about Shane's feedback. The Leap2A file isn't a human readable format. As Kristina correctly observes, it wouldn't be simple to use this file in the way Shane suggests. Having now heard that the redesigned assignment type in Moodle 2.3 won't support Mahara, the ability to push and pull assessment information via the LTI integration is vital to UNSW if we're to continue using Mahara.

Thank you,

Fiona

26 July 2012, 4:35

Having a version history for portfolio pages is an interesting idea, and I assume it would not result in too much overhead on the Mahara server - ie, no doubling up of artifacts, you'd just need a sequential listing of what artifacts the student incorporated into the page and how they were arranged.  

It seems though that having submitted a specific version of the portfolio page to Moodle for assessment would still have to put some constraints on the artifacts in a student's portfolio, such as not being able to replace a document with an updated version if the older document were part of a page version that was submitted for assessment.

23 August 2012, 7:25

Hi Kristina in LearningApps Project (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) we developed the LTI Provider and Consumer

you can find more information here:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/learningapps/index.php?title=LTI4Mahara_English

The LTI Provider was certified by IMS.

Bests regards,

Antoni

23 August 2012, 9:37

Hello Antoni,

Thank you very much for joining the discussion and posting a link to your development work. I didn't know about that.

Unfortunately, I can't test your Mahara instance as it gives an error. Thus, I couldn't quite find out what you can do. Can you then submit your portfolio pages to Moodle for example and have them graded?

Also: Are you thinking of upgrading your plugin to work with Mahara 1.5+ as the groups changed quite a bit?

Cheers

Kristina

27 January 2013, 13:09

Hi

Just a quick query, any news on this new feature?

Cheers

03 March 2013, 19:41

Hello Ali,

I'm afraid there is no update yet.

Cheers

Kristina