09 April 2009, 3:49

Hello Nigel,

(Just back from the Moodle Moot UK), Our college is evaluating Mahara for several pilot projects. The most developed project is being undertaking by the School of Science and Chield Care. It is being tested with a group of young students (under 18s) whose progress was difficult to follow, as some of them were only part time.

I have to say that I was in some of the training sessions with the students and most of them reported Mahara as "very useful " to organize and store their work, and "easy to use".

The main hindrance that we need to avoid here- and I imagine that it will be common to our institutions- is that students use Mahara as a sort of "memory stick" or storage disk. The idea is that they use their creativity in presenting their work  in views and not that they just use the "My Files" area to save what they have done.

I will be able to provide a complete evaluation report by the end of the academic year.

Our college is:

Carnegie College

Fife, Scotland.

carnegiecollege.ac.uk

09 April 2009, 11:10

Yes, usability is sadly in fact a big point. A lot of users on my site don't understand why the message system is placed within the container "Settings". They also don't understand why the menu-items "my friends" and "find friends" are placed within the container "Groups". Third thing the users understand not at all that the search field in the header doesn't work like a Google full-text-search.

09 April 2009, 11:49

Hi Dietmar,

mahara.org shows that it is easy to implement a google fulltext search ;-)

In my opinion it is ok, that such a feature is not installed by default!

HTH Heinz

PS: langpack updated

11 April 2009, 20:32

Hi - yeah, these are all good points. The notifications one day will need a good overhaul. The navigation issues (my friends etc. under "Groups") we hope to resolve in our next usability sprint. The search is another item on the roadmap.

09 April 2009, 11:57

Nigel

Since 1.1.2 we are confident that Mahara will work for some areas of Royal College of Art.  We have had Moodle fully embedded in the Humantities and theory programme and increasingly for representing masterclasses in art, craft and design techniques. We have SSO to Mahara (known as 'Foio').

We are conducting a pilot with Fashion - Menswear, giving students the means to colect, share and publish ongoing work.  It should also operate as a 'cultivator' of contnet for our main web site.  I am considering makig in generally available to all students and maybe alumni to compliment other online presences.   We are developing templated site Views as starting points for different purposes, and willl be asking students to help develop these.  We would like to see areas for collaborative (group?) Views (allowing exhibits to be organised and planned) and plain, collaborative web pages.

Finally we are considering its use for pre selection for online applications, allowing prospective students to submit folios of work in a standard form .

Early days for us though...

JW

09 April 2009, 13:08

Which Royal College of Art  are you referring to? i'm just working on a session introducing Mahara to colleagues in the education authority and want to inspire them with tales of how its being used - so am following this forum closely.

Many thanks 

09 April 2009, 16:19

THE RCA!

http://rca.ac.uk

There is only one!

Who you?

JW

10 April 2009, 0:44

I work for a 14-19 partnership in Cumbria (http://vle.beaconcumbria.cleo.net.uk/) where we're taking a countywide subject based approach to Moodle use. We're already delivering the new Creative and MediaDiploma  and I'm trying to get those guys interested in the eportfolio so slipping in references to how you are using it will boost credibility.

09 April 2009, 16:43

I've been working on teaching how to create an electronic portfolio to my students for my masters project in instructional tech.

isaglobe.org/moodle

 username: student1

password:1student

The mahara is on isaglobe.org. Same username and password. Hopefully it's of use.

 

09 April 2009, 23:23

Hi,

I am also working on this for my masters in Ed. Tech. Thank you for letting me peek at you project. I have a lot to learn still. I did not even realize people could/would look at my testing portfolio.

Thanks