16 October 2013, 22:38

Hi Everyone

So, my school has a unique system in place of tracking student goals and learning styles. Currently in Moodle students do a simple questionaire about themselves and about what their goals are, its about 20 questions with answers varying from text boxes to radio button type answers. This work great and what we do is get them to do the EXACT same question each 6 months and we track the differences.

What Moodle does not do is allow the students to REDO their answers by keeping their old responses. It doesn't allow them to adjust their answer, or goals etc. The result being that we have lots of paperwork and over two years we are manually compairing etc. We don't mind the manual compare, but we really want the students to be able to see their previous response and update it as things may change. EG. I want to be a doctor changed 6 months later to i want to be a nurse.

My questions: 

1. Can the fields in Mahara be easily modified, eg. the Resume and Goals section.

2. Is it possible to export that data as one spreadsheet? (csv etc) Is it even possible via the database itself? And by export i mean ALL files together so we can export and see all 800 student resumes.

There are many 'survey' type software solutions out there but we use moodle and we like the login approach that way we know the students responses really are their responses. Mahara is a possible solution.

Thanks in advance. Feel free mods to move this if it goes somewhere else.

Jay

17 October 2013, 0:02

Hi Jay:

This is something that I'd like as well. I think that Gregor's "work in progress" Survey module could be tweaked in that direction pretty easily:

https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Plugins/Artefact/Survey

If you know someone with knowledge of XML, you may be able to take what's been done to date and customize it.

Not sure about the stats part, though...

21 October 2013, 15:50

Hello Jay and Don,

Yes, the survey plugin sounds like a good start because it allows you to set up your own questions. The bit that would definitely need modifying is the requiement for keeping old data while overwriting it and then being able to compare all old versions to the current one to see the changes. It might be a possibility to  allow the students to retake a survey, but pre-fill the questionnaire with their answers from last time and then allow them to display all versions of their survey on their portfolio page in individual blocks.

Cheers

Kristina

26 December 2013, 14:17

What about just creating a template page:

First there is a blank template with just the headers (aka questions).  Then the student copies the page.

Year 1 - Beginning of year.

They fill in the page and it saves automatically.

The next time, they take the previous page, and copy it to the next page;

Year 1 - mid year.

They then modify their answers as appropriate.

If these pages are put into a collection, the student then gets a whole record of how they have grown over the years.

Don't know about the whole exporting thing.  I have been thinking that it would be nice to be able to export a page as an XML file.  If that is done, then the rest of you want to do would be easy to implement.

Melissa