26 January 2016, 5:15

Hello all, I originally posted this in the Open Discussion forum, but this location seems more appropriate.

My institution is vetting e-portfolio solutions and we love Mahara's e-portfolio functionality. The problem is we already have social networking tools for our students, which would conflict with Mahara's Groups and Friends functionality.

Can Mahara be easily configured to turn off groups and friends, leaving only the portfolio tools available for students?

Thanks!

-Jason Hardin

26 January 2016, 9:52

Hello Jason,

Great that you are thinking about using Mahara. There are some functionalities in Mahara that can be hidden. You can see what you can hide in Administration -> Extensions -> Plugin administration.

At the moment, we don't have a way of deinstalling core functionality and not all group functionality can be hidden. However, if you make changes to your code you should be able to achieve that. One simple quick way would be to remove the groups menu item and hide all group blocks. Users will then only get to the groups functionality if they know the URL pattern. For friends, you'd need to dig a bit deeper as you can see friend controls on your account settings page.

Hiding items in the menu isn't foolproof as one can always still navigate to the areas, but if you don't allow regular members to create groups, there wouldn't be any groups to join. You could also change the friend setting that nobody can friend you or you could look into making a change so that the functionality forwards students to their existing social network.

Maybe using groups could be beneficial though as they could serve a different purpose than the groups in your social network. We see that quite nicely between an LMS and Mahara for example: LMS course functionality and Mahara group functionality does overlap to a degree, but they can be used for different purposes: LMS courses are for formal learning and Mahara groups for more informal exchange between students or just used for collecting assessment portfolios.

Of course in your case, social network groups and Mahara groups might be too close and they couldn't be as easily distinguished as an LMS and Mahara.

Cheers

Kristina

29 January 2016, 6:25

Thank you Kristina,

I appreciate the valuable information!

-Jason Hardin