08 November 2013, 3:48

Hi everybody,

I began to use Mahara last year as tutor in the context of an italian teacher training course. The experience was successful and I would like to continue to use Mahara.

I think that the things that really lack in Mahara are the statistics and the possibility to track users access and action. I explored this forum but I couldn't understand whether developers are working on it. As a researcher those kind of information are very useful in order to understand whether the course design was effective and what worked better.

Another thing that could be useful is the possibility to communicate synchronously with other users while you're connected.

Thank you for your answers,

best

stefania

08 November 2013, 6:33

Hello Stefania,

Come va?

My personal answer to your questions would be the following :

Mahara is not a course management system therefore I don't think the Mahara team could provide stats which permit to determine what has worked in term of tasks and activities. On the other hand, I think that I have a good representation of what has worked well when I assess the portfolios my students send me for feedback and assessment.

In Mahara there is a place, accessible for site admin and, if the site admin has decided so, to institution admin and staff. With these you already have a good idea of who is doing what and you can trace students who are not engaging with their portfolios to try to help them if they don't because they are struggling with the tasks.

In term of having a instant chat between participants, I agree with you that it is a good idea. There are already a few discussion in the forums and on the trackers about such a feature like this. I guess it is also a question of who could pay for the development of this.

You said that the experience you started last year of using Mahara was successful, and as a researcher, I would be very interested to hear / read more about this. Maybe not on this forum but on Pedagogy?

-dajan

11 November 2013, 13:56

There is a wishlist item for realtime chat in Mahara: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/547932

It's been on the wishlist since 2009.

As dajan said, I have heard from various sources that are seriously thinking about implementing it, so we may see something soon.

Cheers,

Aaron