18 May 2009, 6:19

Hello everyone,

We intend to install and pilot Mahara at our university. Can anyone already using Mahara give a rough indication as to:

1. How long it might take to install Mahara.
2. How long it might take to integrate Mahara and Moodle.
3. How much work might be involved in the ongoing technical support and maintenance of Mahara.
   

Thanks,

Morag

18 May 2009, 6:33

Hi Morag,

greetings from Germany and the maintainer of the German langpack.

I installed a lot of mahara and moodle sites, but didn´t use a stopwatch to measure the time ;-)

Here my estimation:

• download and installation if all requirements are fulfilled: 1/2 hour
• mahoodle setup: 1/2 hour
• administration/backup/etc:  depending of users

HTH

Heinz

18 May 2009, 8:18

Hello Morag,

 I would agree with the average values provided by Heinz (indeed the integration of Mahara and Moodle only took me 20 minutes), but these are merely indicative values  "if everything goes right".

I guess that what you are trying to measure probably is the workload for maintaning a Mahara site, and I don't think that knowing the average times for installing Mahara and integrating it with Moodle is going to give you a good insight.

Once Mahara is installed, you need to test that everything is working fine and that files can be uploaded and views can be created. You also need to map  the institution/s you are going to use in your site (different for staff  and students? the same?)... You need to check that the pluggins for authorizing users for  each institutions are working properly, etc...

 The main workload is due to the administration and maintenance tasks-which also includes training to Staff-  and depends, as Heiz has mentioned, of the volume of users of your site.

 Regards

Aaricia/Mari

18 May 2009, 8:27

Hi Morag

you have already got two good answers ;) I can only confirm that staff training is an important factor otherwise you have your trials and nothing exiting happens, i.e. some kind of ePortfolio teaching method needs to be in place. I am looking after a few trials and in my experience usage on the ground can vary widely. Once you got some creative people on board you might think about using templates for portfolios - and that would be another item to consider when thinking about workload.

Cheers Christian

19 May 2009, 5:19

Hi Heinz, Aaricia and Christian

Thank you very much for your feedback, and for responding so quickly!

Morag