12 December 2014, 10:53

Hi Dajan and others.

This has been a very helpful thread, especially the Connect webinar.

My comment about badge design is that it is possible to design text based badges that convey consistency and are readable at even the moodle default of 90x90 pixels. Possible but difficult!

With Open Badge Factory giving a generous 200x200 it should also be possible to get a brand icon with text, but we have chosen not to go that route in the interim.

12 December 2014, 12:13

Ah, badges, don't get me started!

OK, one little thing: using the Open Badge Factory plug-in (issuer, not displayer), you can award badges from inside Mahara. When accepting OBF badges, earners can attach evidence that will travel with the badge.

OK, I'll stop now...

PS: Audio working for me now too.

12 December 2014, 14:39

Hi Don

I am grateful to you and Eric for making me aware of Open Badge Factory at  Epic earlier this year. Now I am a convert to OBF! although we will issue some from mahara.

Cheers!

12 December 2014, 16:24

That's great David!

Mahara and Badges, these are a few of my favourite things..(cue music)

14 December 2014, 16:16

Hello Leanne,

There is a rubrics plugin available (see https://github.com/eportfolio/rubric-plugin ) but I don't yet have installation instructions or information on how it works. Hopefully, the developer will provide those. He is also working on a prototype for a block to put onto a Mahara page for the rubrics. Watch this space.

The idea about providing more information about a rubric via a help icon sounds great though keep in mind that it would show up on every page that is created unless you do some developer magic. Another possibility would be to create a page with the rubric on the site / institution level and link to it from the instructions that you write for the activity.

If you create a template for your students to help them get started with their portfolio as dajan suggests, you could set up the rubric as a text block so that they get it directly with the template page. You can create a template as any user by just making your page copyable when you set the access permissions for your page. So you can set up a template page in your own portfolio, in a group, and on the institution / site level.

If you have Moodle set up alongside your Mahara instance, you could use the Mahara assignment submission plugins to submit your Mahara pages / collections into a Moodle assignment. Then you can set up a rubric for grading the portfolio and the grade is put into the Moodle gradebook automatically. Alternatively, if you don't want / can't install the plugin or don't have Moodle, you could set up an activity on your LMS that has rubric grading possibilities and put a link to the Mahara portfolio as answer to the assignment. The easiest is most likely to create a secret URL for the portfolio instead of sharing it with the assessor.

Or, if you do not want to connect Mahara to an LMS, but still assess the student portfolios, you could set up a group on Mahara that allows submissions (you need to have staff or admin permissions to see that option in your group setup). Then you could put the rubric either onto a group page or in a text block on the group homepage for the students to see easily. Students then submit their portfolios to the group. When you give feedback, you could copy and paste the table with the rubric into the feedback area so that the students see their result directly there. This is a rather manual method of adding a rubric, but a possibility. Mahara does not yet have many assessment features as it was initially built as portfolio to foster the creation of a personal learning environment. However, there are ways of using Mahara for assessment, and there are bound to be more features coming to provide better assessment support. If you are interested in supporting the development of that, please let me know.

Cheers

Kristina