26 February 2016, 22:53

Hi

Please excuse my lack of knowledge of the learning sector. I am a newly appointed one man band IT Support person for a social enterprise training organisation in UK. I do IT and not Teaching. Up to now our company has been using www.eCordia.co.uk but our management has decided this is too expensive so I looked around for an ePortfolio alternative. I came across Mahara and have set it up for our training manager to assess.

When I asked her how she was getting on with it she said Mahara did not fulfill the functionality we need. She said we need Teaching Standards associated to the units that a Learner is taking, A submission system for learners to submit work, A system of feedback between Assessors and Learners and a progress line/chart that reflects what a Learner has achieved. 

Now my question is "Does Mahara fit the minimum requirements of what we need?"

I installed Mahara straight out of the box and have not configured it in any way. Do I need to do some configuration and enabling of the functions that we need? Do I need some kind of plugins installed for the features we need? Is this a case of the manager not digging deep enough into Mahara to find the functions? 

Please help with a little guidance regarding the above and if I am barking up the wrong tree with Mahara then please could you advise me of a system that would fulfill our needs?

29 February 2016, 7:54

Hello Brian,

Thank you for your questions. Mahara was built as personal learning environment and over the years has been adding some assessment features though at the moment still very lightly. We do want to make more progress on the front of assessments that suit ePortfolios rather than purely replicating assessment features that are available in a learning management system (though there can be some overlap).

One initiative that we'd like to progress further but haven't had the time and funding to do so is creating the SmartEvidence functionality. Please see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvobSsWEsmU for example for an overview and the idea behind it. That sounds very much like what your colleague would like to see.

You can already submit work to Mahara or Moodle at the moment. Please see http://manual.mahara.org/en/15.10/portfolio/feedback.html#feedback-for-assessment for submitting work directly into Mahara and receiving free-form feedback on it. Alternatively, if you worked with Moodle as LMS, you can install the Mahara assignment submission plugin https://moodle.org/plugins/assignsubmission_mahara and utilize your standard Moodle grading functionalities including the use of a rubric.

Feedback in Mahara doesn't just have to be written comments but an assessor can also upload feedback files (audio, video, revised documents).

Cheers

Kristina