08 July 2015, 22:43

Hello.

I want to use Mahara as an independent platform, I do not want to use Moodle and Mahara, I think the portfolio is very powerful and I can use it regardless.

But I have a problem. I do not know how to qualify the students. Moodle and Blackboard have tools for qualifying students. I do not see that in Mahara.

That is the only problem that I have to use Supplied tools.

How do ye you solved this problem?

09 July 2015, 7:21

That's a really interesting question Pablo.

I use mahara as a social-learning/curating tool without assessment in a formal classroom sense.

This approach generates some problems because it is too easy for participants to opt out of the challenge to create meaningful content. Most prefer to observe rather than create.

As an experiment I have begun integrating Open Badges as a gamification of some activities like forum interaction, creating a group, or a page collection.

It's early days yet and the uptake is slow, so some badging parameters and criteria may need to change. You can see part of the experiment here.

The tools developed by the Open Badge Factory have been invaluable for this.

At present I am also experimenting with Live Hangouts on Air streaming into a mahara page but our slow internet speeds meant the initial attempt was a bit painful. 

09 July 2015, 12:58

Hi Pablo,

The main built-in assessment system in Mahara is group submissions. See: http://manual.mahara.org/en/15.04/portfolio/feedback.html#submit-page

That's unstructured assessment. Mahara currently contains no structured assessment tools, but there's the "SmartEvidence" system, which is in development: http://www.slideshare.net/maharahuinz/maharahui-kirby-nuessler20140320

I believe we're still trying to find funding to finish the implementation of SmartEvidence. If your institution is interested in helping making that a reality, please talk to Kristina Hoeppner, here at Catalyst: https://mahara.org/user/anitsirk :)

Cheers,

Aaron

10 July 2015, 5:46

Thank you very much to both.

Good to know that the tool is being developed further.

What does it cost to develop a tool of this kind?

I could propose to my intitucion, but I can not promise anything haha.

I have a question more. I can not share a personal view with a group. Copying a view and appears directly in a group. as a teacher I can make a view and use it in more than one group effortlessly. it would be perfect. Or choose a winner among the students view and copy for group directly.

10 July 2015, 8:56

Hello Pablo,

New features generally require funding from the people who would like to have the feature. ;-) That could also be a group of people if you can find one. There is no one rule for how much a feature costs as that depends on its complexity.

If you want to see an updated presentation about SmartEvidence from this year, you can view the presentation that Shane and I gave a couple of months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvobSsWEsmU

We'd love to hear what you would like to be able to accomplish. Maybe there is already a starting point in Mahara and we wouldn't start from scratch.

As for your other question: You can share a page with a group on the regular sharing screen. You can select the group directly from the list if you are a member of the group. If you aren't, you can still find the group under "Share with other users". Please see http://manual.mahara.org/en/15.04/portfolio/share.html for more information.

Since you talk about "views": What version of Mahara do you use? The latest (and finest to date) is 15.04. If you are just starting out, you should use that one. And there "views" are called "pages". We dropped "views" a few years ago.

Cheers

Kristina

10 July 2015, 9:46

Thanks again.

I already know pretty well platform. I know the possibility of sharing with groups, but in this case appears in the decade portfolio member of the group and not in the group directly.

I would like to appear directly as a view of the group.

Regarding the qualifications I would like to rate the students and that each of them to see only your note directly without seeing the rest of students. All this from a single file as does Blackboard.

Perhaps I misspoke because my English is not good.

Sorry.

I tried several versions of Mahara and now use the latest stable

13 July 2015, 6:04

Hello Pablo,

If you make your page copyable ("Allow copying" under the "Advanced options" on the "Edit access" pages) to the group, you can copy the page into your group and have it there instead of just sharing it with the group.

Once complete, SmartEvidence would have an overview page for the portfolio of a student on which you'd only see one student and can give feedback on their portfolio. I doubt though that we are going to implement a gradebook any time soon. That lives in the LMS. ;-)

Cheers

Kristina