13 April 2016, 22:10

Hi all,

I have attended the last couple of MaharaHuiUK events and have met a few of you at these great gatherings so hello again! However, I am a first-time poster here as I have an issue I hope more experienced Mahara users might be able to help me with.

At the University of Kent we are currently using Mahara, among other things, to facilitate an Employability Points Scheme (where students log points earned for extra-curricular activities and exchange these for internships with local employers etc.) My team (the e-learning team) thought that this process lacked a reflective element and so we created a group for students enrolled on the scheme and created a portfolio template that students could follow and copy in order to create their own portfolios.

The problem we now have is that the team running the scheme would like to track usage of the template but there does not appear to be a way to do this.

Has anyone attempted this in the past and as such learned any lessons that could help us out?

Thanks and kind regards,

Stephen Ganfield

14 April 2016, 11:18

Hello Stephen,

Congrats on taking the plunge and asking your first question in the wider community. :-)

Currently, there is no functionality in Mahara to track what people do with your templates, how many times they have been copied etc. and you are the first person asking that question. :-)

What do you want to be able to track / report on?

Cheers

Kristina

14 April 2016, 23:11

Hi Kristina,

Thanks for getting back to me and great to talk with you again following our meeting in Southampton last November. :o)

I think initially we would like to be able to simply track/report on exactly how many times the template has been copied as this is the first time students have been required to produce a portfolio detailing their experience and achievements on the Employability Points Scheme. Knowing this figure would help us to measure its usage and impact and help promote its use to future cohorts.

We are currently sharing the template with a group that participants are enrolled into (potentially holding thousands of participants) who are then copying it in order to create their own portfolio. As proof of concept we have asked students to pretty much follow the template initially (simply replacing placeholder content with their own) and have suggested a naming convention of 'My EPS Journey - Joe Bloggs' in order to try and track them but students could always not follow this advice.

Also, future iterations might see them copy the template and use it much more as a guide while having more freedom to put their individual mark on their portfolio page and it would be useful to have a way to track that they at least used the template as a basis for the page they created.

Cheers,

Steve

18 April 2016, 14:09

Hi there Stephen and Kristina

We would be interested in something like this too.

We have had an increase of lecturers using templates  for students this year, and it would provide lecturers with valuable figures to see how many times their templates have been copied.

Regards

Lisa Ransom

Auckland University of Technology

Auckland, New Zealand