03 April 2013, 3:39

Hi,

I am a first poster to this forum, and I think this question has probably been asked before. 

Is there a recommended allocation of storage space per student for Mahara? The baseline provided in the out of the box version is 50Mb. 

And my apologies if this has been asked before, I am happy to be guided to some information. I just need to know where to start.

Best wishes

Paul

03 April 2013, 19:51

Dear Paul,

It is very easy to answer your question. The true answer is: it depends.

Beyond the joke it really depends what you want your users do with Mahara. If their portfolios will based on multimedia documents you store inside Mahara's file system, then yes you will need to grant your users with 100 to 300 MB, maybe.

If the data your users will manage in their portfolios are made of text based documents, 15 to 50 MB is more than enough.

Now in my experience of managing vocational students making videos, mp3 and adding a lot of multimedia artefacts to their portfolios, I can tell you that each of our students have 150 MB to work with Mahara.

You can also teach your users to use less space. For example you can teach them that scanning a text page from a book to display it afterward only on a screen has not to take more than hundreds of Kb, not Mb or Gb, as I already saw in my institution. A scan in black and withe 75 dpi is enough. Also learning then to compress multimedia documents and use the proper format for the web (e.g. mp3 instead of AIFF).

Another point is to make more use of external media. For example put the videos on Youtube, the pictures on Flikr, the docs on GoogleDocs. The drawback of this is that you don't have the handle on the source. If the video disappear on Youtube, the portfolio will lose it as well.

You can also play with putting common files at the system level or at the group level, this is avoiding a duplication of standard documents used by a large group of users.

Don't forget that you also have some obligation to your students, in term of data protection. So the more space you give, the more space you will have to backup and to protect.

Hope my comment will help, sorry for not giving you THE answer to your question.

04 April 2013, 12:18

Hello Paul,

Welcome to the forums. :-)

As dajan said, it depends. Some institutions give 100 or 250 MB whereas for MyPortfolio.school.nz we allow users to upload up to 1 GB. But not many people have reached that limit yet. It really depends with what media you want your users to work and whether it is possible for you to store "heavy" files, i.e. video and audio, elsewhere online.

Schools cannot always do that in order to protect the privacy of students shown in the vidoes and thus would need more storage space compared to those who can use YouTube / Vimeo etc.

Cheers

Kristina