04 June 2013, 23:42

Our teacher education team have trialled using Mahara however they are not able to mark appropriately the formative assessments submitted by learners.

The awarding body & Ofsted require teachers to mark and comment throughout a learner's piece of work (as they could do using Review in Microsoft Office)

Using the comments/eedback at the bottom of the Mahara page is unfortunately not adequate.

Can you offer any suggestions or solutions for this?

05 June 2013, 0:47

Might be a good idea to post this in the Pedagogy one.

Before I comment further, what subject are you doing and what awarding body is it. I am not aware of any subject requiring inline annotation specific to a particular application.

That said, the alternative is to use Google Docs and have the student share it with you. You can then embed the document on a Mahara page and add comments from there - I guess?

09 June 2013, 16:11

Hello Clare,

How are your students adding their work? Is it in individual blocks or is it one long piece? If the text is in individual blocks or journal entries, then a teacher can comment directly on them instead of just at the bottom of the page. Journal entries have the "Comments" and for text boxes just click at the title of the text box and you'll be taken to its details page. If the student allowed comments, you'll be able to leave your feedback directly there. The same is true for images and other files.

You might also want to look at https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1037531 and add any thoughts that you have to improving the feedback functionality.

Cheers

Kristina

18 June 2013, 1:27

Hi Kristina,
I have tried out your suggestions.  perhaps we are not running the correct version of Mahara?  I have pasted below the secret URL to a test page.  We need to be able to add the feedback into the text box however when I click on the text box title the option to leave feedback is not available....

http://moodle2.sparsholt.ac.uk/mahara/view/view.php?t=HwRiYTXyu5QFokU8qOjx

Any ideas?

18 June 2013, 2:36

I just placed feedback twice, using the link at the bottom left...can you not see it in your browser?

19 June 2013, 19:42

Hi Don,

I can see the feedback however I need the feedback comments to be within the body of the text, not at the bottom of the page.

Thanks

Clare

18 June 2013, 20:58

Hello Clare,

The default setting for text boxes / notes does not allow for comments. Students would need to turn them on individually (see http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.7/content/notes.html#edit-your-notes and then #5 in the screenshot for editing your notes). It might be worthwhile making a code change in your instance so that text boxes can have comments by default.

I filed a wishlist item for creating a setting to allow comments on notes per default at https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1192092

Cheers

Kristina

19 June 2013, 19:46

Thanks Kristina.  We are not yet on version 1.7 however I will explore the option of making a code change.

21 June 2013, 11:11

Hello Clare,

That functionality already exists in Mahara 1.5 and 1.6. I just posted the link to the 1.7 manual. Just change the 7 to your version of Mahara in the URL and off you go. :-)

Cheers

Kristina