08 May 2014, 1:43

Hi,

Just wondering if there's an update on the Mahara/Moodle functionality for submitting pages and collections to a Moodle assignment?

This sounded ideal - https://github.com/catalyst/assignsubmission_mahara

but the Mahara review link says 'abandoned'. The Moodle tracker suggests this has gone into core - but for which release version?

Our sites are being upgraded this summer to Moodle 2.6 and maybe Mahara 1.9 (certainly 1.8) so I was wondering whether it's been approved for core code for both platforms or if we'd need to implement the patch separately - or if it's been superceded by other developments?

Thanks, Gordon.

09 May 2014, 11:38

Hi Gordon,

That plugin is indeed live and ready to use, more or less. I think at least one university in Australia is already using it in production. I have received a few bug reports which have not yet been resolved, but on the whole I'd say it's no less buggy than the previous version.

The Moodle patch has been merged into Moodle 2.7, but Moodle HQ didn't want to backport it to 2.6, for code stability reasons. The Mahara patch did not make it into 1.9.0, which is why the 1.9_STABLE patch was abandoned. There is another identical patch for 1.10 which is still in the process of code review. I've updated the README to reflect this situation.

For now, this plugin is probably the way to go if you want collections support. There's another updated version of the Moodle-Mahara plugin that was developed by Portland University, which I think has a nicer-looking front-end interface, but I don't think it supports collections yet. Since I've written the back-end code to handle collections, I should probably contact them and get them to update their version of the plugin to support collections. Their plugin is here: https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/System_Administrator%27s_Guide/Moodle//Mahara_Integration/View_Submission#Mahara_assignment_plugins_set_.28Portland_University.29

There's also talk about replacing this plugin with something using LTI, as well as the long-term talk about replacing MNet with a different system, but those haven't happened yet.

Cheers,

Aaron