11 April 2014, 12:37

Here's an idea that I dreamed up at the 2014 Mahara Hui: An "LMS" plugin for Mahara.

(If you're not familiar with the term, an LMS is a learning management system, i.e. a system for online classes, like Moodle or Blackboard.)

It came about, because this is something that a lot of smaller institutions are interested in. They have a Mahara site. They want to do a few LMS-like things, like having grades, running quizzes, etc. But they don't want to run a whole Moodle site. So, they'd like to do this within their Mahara site.

Enter the Mahara LMS plugin. This would be an "interaction" plugin, which is a plugin type that adds functionality to groups (the forums are an interaction plugin). The way it would work:

• You create a Mahara group for each "course" (like a Moodle course)
• Mahara groups already support tutor and student roles, so that's taken care of
• The plugin would come with blocks for different LMS content -- quizzes, assignments, polls, etc.
• The teacher would create pages in the group, put LMS blocks into them, and then the students would visit the page to access the LMS content (perhaps linking them from the group homepage)
• The interaction plugin would also add a "gradebook" tab to the group, from which the teacher and student could see their grades
• I suppose you'd also need to customize the forum plugin and the existing group submission system, to interoperate with this...

Anyway, there's the idea. The goal would not be to create something as big and full-featured as Moodle, but simply to get a barebones LMS running inside Mahara.

Unfortunately I can't see myself implementing this any time soon, because it would require a lot of work, and this would mostly be beneficial to small institutions that lack much software development budget.

So, I just thought I'd toss this idea out here, as a sort of thought experiment.

The "quiz" and "gradebook" parts of Moodle are some of its most complicated parts, and those are a bare minimum for this idea. But perhaps you could start by cribbing the quiz and gradebook sections from an older version of Moodle, when they were much simpler (and more similar to Mahara's codebase, which is based in part on an old Moodle version).

Cheers,

Aaron

11 April 2014, 23:46

Hi Aaron:

You made it sound so clear and simple that I was disappointed to see that it was a lot of work!

My only comment would be adding Badge functionality, ie issuing, either directly or via API to an external issuer.

14 April 2014, 11:07

Hi Don,

Well, maybe I've gone too far and made it sound too complicated. What would you actually need as the bare minimum for this? I'm thinking maybe:

1. Gradebook.

• Which grading options are considered the minimum? It's hard for me to say because I'm not a teacher. Maybe I should look at Moodle 1.0 and see what they implemented first

2. Quiz

• Simple grading logic
• Multiple choice question type
• True/false question type
• Fill-in-the-blank question type
• Essay question type? (requires implementing manual grading)

3. "Assignment"

• Like the Moodle "assignment" module
• Consists of a prompt, and then an option for students to fill in text, or supply a chosen Mahara page

4. Any other modules?

Yeah, I think the hardest part would be the grading logic. The gradebook is, in my experience, the most complicated part of Moodle, both codewise and feature-wise.

Cheers,

Aaron

08 May 2014, 1:31

Hi Aaron,

Moodle Gradebook is also one of the hardest tools to use because it's so complicated - a simpler tool that harvests "gradeable" activities for each student and displays them to tutors would be better. I guess you might want both group level and site level reporting of those activities. I know there's more to it - but I'd suggest Moodle might not be the best template for what you want this to do.

Something else that would be extremely useful from LMS toolset and Mahara as a whole (and to an extent already exists) is some sort of survey functionality - define a set of questions, and students get their own blank copy to fill in (which is then collated for tutor or group admin).

Regards, Gordon.

09 May 2014, 11:21

Hi Gordon,

I suppose a lot of the complexity of the Moodle gradebook has to do with its functionality for computing grade totals, because there are so many different methods for doing that, for weighting different assignments, etc. If you left that out, and only displayed the individual grades for each activity, with no totalling, then it would be a LOT simpler. Then it's basically just a table of users x activities, with a grade at each intersection.

Is that what you mean?

Regarding surveys, that's actually something that could be done without needing the full LMS plugin, come to think of it. Polls, as well. Gregor Anzelj was working on a survey plugin back in 2012: https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Plugins/Artefact/Survey

Cheers,

Aaron

12 December 2014, 3:45

Hi Don,

I think that Discendum Oy (the OpenBadge Factory OBF maker) will propose this sooner or later, regarding the talk we had with Eric Rousselle the CEO.

-dajan

14 December 2014, 16:25

Hello dajan,

Do you have some more information that you can share?

Thank you

Kristina