05 October 2016, 20:53

Hi there,

I'm working on moving my institution to Mahara 16.04 from 1.9 and I wanted to ask if a certain approach was possible.

Ideally I would like to keep out 1.9 server running and open a 16.04 server to run along side it. This would hopefully allow staff and students with ongoing work a grace period on 1.9 while they export their work and import into 16.04. I really don't want to try and upgrade my 1.9 installation as it seems much riskier than a clean 16.04 install. In addition I see this as a good time to set up a more organised way of running our Mahara (all groups created by admins and given date ranges etc.).

What I'm interested in is whether it would be possible to set up mahoodle SSO for both of these Mahara servers linking them back to our Moodle. Our 1.9 server is already linked to our Moodle but I'm unclear on whether linking the new 16.04 server also would cause issues.

Thanks in advance for your input.

06 October 2016, 22:17

Hi Conor,

In my experience you can have many Mahoodle SSO set up (not sure exactly how many) but I found you can only have one linked from the Network servers block.  A workaround is to have the second site linked via a universally accessed course or the HTML block.  We had to do the same when we upgraded and linked the two sites within a course everyone had access to.

Hope that helps.

Remy

07 October 2016, 2:47

I have one moodle connected to two mahara and both links ware show at the moodle mainpage. So it is possible but you can only connect to different mahara with different urls.

You can not connect from one moodle two institutions in the same mahara.

Hint: Do not work in mahara in the main institution. First create a new institution and use this for productivity work.

10 October 2016, 9:00

Hello Conor,

You can set up multiple Moodle's with one Mahara without a problem, and as Andreas mentioned, the links will show up in the Network Servers block. In order to prevent confusion, they should be named very clearly so students know which link to click on.

It might be a bit tricky - depending on your student and lecturer population - to work with two sites at the same time. I could imagine that they just continue working in one site rather than trying to be logged in to two at the same time and do some things in one and others in the second one.

You can do an in-place upgrade directly from 1.9 to 16.04 (or the upcoming 16.10) and then change the settings, e.g. to not allow students group creation permissions anymore, and then clear out old groups. You can view all groups in Administration -> Administer groups.

From Mahara 16.10 on (to be released shortly), you will be able to manage all groups, no matter whether created via CSV or nor, via CSV files and could then change all the admins in the groups or remove users from groups via CSV.

If you do want to work with both sites, it might be good to have instructions for students on how they can export their portfolio content from one into the other instance so they don't lose their work.

Cheers

Kristina

13 October 2016, 23:03

A big thank you to everyone who provided advice here - much appreciated.

I'm going to go ahead and try linking our new Mahara instance to our test Moodle before I roll this out on our Live Moodle server. 

Thanks for the general advice on ensuring staff and students can cope with two Mahara instances Kristina. Fortunately for me I'm anticipating that some groups will move completely to the new Mahara while some groups will remain on the old one until the Summer. Hopefully that will help to cut down on confusion. I'm also planning some tutorials and videos to help people move over their work from the old to new Mahara.

Once again thanks for all your help and advice.

17 October 2016, 12:39

Hello Conor,

All the best with getting things sorted and then make it easy for your students and staff to work with the new site.

Cheers

Kristina