03 August 2013, 7:21

Hi there, we have been using Mahara for just one year now. I would like to know is there a way to archive the previous years portfolios and start from scratch each new school year.

Apologies if this topic has already been discussed.

Dave

03 August 2013, 10:08

Hi Dave,

I did a quick search and am empty handed also. I one way users could archive their pages is by running an HTML export containing all pages of a particular year. Once eported, editing becomes cumbersome of course, but maybe you wont want to edit them anyways, and you wont be able to view the exported pages in a mahara system.
Renaming all pages by including a year for example comes to mind. Doing that has the nice effect that the sorting of pages would be nice (I think). For example '2013 Accomplishments' '2013 Goals and Aspirations' etc
With the upcoming (hopefully) feature in 1.8 that would allow a user to insert a previously exported eportfolio as LEAP2A might have some potential. Maybe you could run a mahara for each year and have users export/import a years work into one of those? Sounds cumbersome also and has some risks I am sure.

Maybe use tags for this? I personally have used a tag for each year '2012', '2013' etc and at least it does some nice sorting that way. Ultimately, I think there could be a better way to do this where they system would sort and keep track of this and have a 'Add to 2013 archive' button for example.

05 August 2013, 16:14

Hi Dave,

There's not a per-year archive feature built in to Mahara. In fact, the software was designed with the opposite idea in mind, that the users' portfolio should accumulate and grow over time, "evidence of lifelong learning".

I think Dirk has some good suggestions about how you could achieve this, though.

It is an issue that I see a lot more often with Moodle sites, where they want to create new Moodle courses for each year, but want to retain access to the student assignments and content in the old courses. Some institutions actually create a new Moodle site for each school year, something like http://moodle10.example.edu, http://moodle11.example.edu, http://moodle12.example.edu. We are implementing a feature in Moodle 1.8 to allow users to import Leap2a files into their existing account, so in theory if a student wanted to port something from the previous year's Mahara site into the current year's, they could log in to the old site, export the desired Page to leap2a, and then import it into the current year's site.

Tagging and renaming are also great ideas, as ways to keep the content present, but mark it as belonging to the previous year. I don't think there's a feature to do this automatically, however. It could be done with a fairly simple SQL or PHP script, if you've got any programming resources available to you.

Cheers,

Aaron

06 August 2013, 20:31

As a way of archiving, I create a new institution (eg 2012-13 students) and move them from the 'live' institution to the archive one, which gives the students access to their account for a year after they have left college to use their portfolios as they require (hopefully as evidence to get a job) and then just gives me a set of current students to deal with in the 'live' institution.

Possibly an idea for you to look at.