05 March 2014, 22:44

We would like students to be able to create collaborative pages/collections, within a group, and then submit the pages so they are locked from editing for assessment. We have previously done this for individual submissions, but I can’t find a way to enable students to created collaborative pages within a group, and then enable them to submit the pages.

We are using Mahara 1.7, but are due to upgrade to 1.8 shortly.

If anyone has found a way of doing this I’d be grateful for any advice…

05 March 2014, 23:40

Hello Sue,

If you have a look at the forums you will find different posts talking about or requesting the kind of features you are descrbing here.

Unfortunatelly, Mahara is not offering this at the moment. My point of view is that format assessment is maybe to be left to Moodle, which has already group-assessment feautres onboard (from version 2.6 and onward).

To do so an extention (plugin) has to be installed on Moodle and Mahara. The actual problem is that the later is outdated and a new version has been rewritten and should be available soon for the community.

As far I know about it, it is not sure that the Moodle's goup-assessment feature will be implemented in that version. But I read that it could be in a near future.

In short, I would say that your are rising a good point; you are not the only one requesting a feature like this in Mahara; but for now the only direct answer I see is "this is urgent to wait".

Regards,

-dajan

21 March 2015, 0:49

Dear Sue,

Late to this - we have found a way at UCL which is not too onerous. In a nutshell, the group space becomes uneditable at the deadline, and assessors are added to the groups so they can see everything.

We give every student Admin access in their group (for trust reasons and permissions reasons), so we have to do a little bit more at the deadline. Basically a Mahara Admin uses a csv file to put students (and their tutors) into groups. Later that person uses the same file to change the students' role to Member at the deadline, which effectively prevents them editing, and add the assessors at the same time.

It works well for us and has caught on in a number of departments. I have a timeline of what happens when here (sorry, image heavy so may take a while to load):

https://prezi.com/lgeqf6li9snd/planning-supporting-and-assessing-students-group-projects-in-mahara/

Best,

Mira

23 March 2015, 15:19

Hello Mira,

Thank you for sharing your work flow. You might be able to shave off a bit of the admin time when you work with a couple of settings for your group. The following two options allow you to have your students as members in the group from the start.

You can determine who shall be able to add and edit pages in a group in the settings. For the semester, you would allow everyone to add and edit pages and at the end, you'd only allow administrators to do that.

Alternatively, you can set an end date for editing (also in the group settings). That way, only administrators can make changes, add / delete pages and forum posts, but regular members would only have read-only access.

Cheers

Kristina