12 November 2019, 0:40

Hello,

I've looking into this forum trying to find a thread with an issue similar to mine, but just some similar situations, such as this one. I am going to open a new one.

We have a Mahara installation running since a couple of years (https://egelaportfolio.ehu.eus). Users can enter with the LDAP account, but it is not connected to our Moodle. Lots of accounts have been created, because there is a banner in our Moodle frontpage, but very few have build pages (about two hundred).  Nevertheless, a lot have made friendship contacts with other users.

We are now considering to connect both platforms, letting Moodle users export to Mahara portfolio and submit their pages or collections to Moodle assignments. We have one test environments with this connection and, in this approach,  users login only through Moodle. Getting this approach to our production environment rises this issue:

• What do we have to do in order that our users would find their previous content / friendship relations when entering from Moodle? Is there any experience that we can learn from?

Moreover, those other issues have been identified:

• Mahara frontpage would be skipped, because users will go straigh away to their dasboard. Therefore, we are loosing the perfect place to explain to our community the benefits of using Mahara.
• New performance and maintenance tasks derived for the Mahoodle integration.

Many thanks in advance,

15 November 2019, 11:34

Hi Ramón,

Thank you for your questions. Happy to discuss them with you next week in Barcelona. A quick response now here.

I would recommend setting up the connection via LTI rather than MNet.

You can leave the LDAP accounts in place and thus allow people to log in via LDAP and Mahara. LTI (and MNet as well) allow for this dual process. If you go with that, you don't have to change anything on the authentication of your students as the parent authentication method (LDAP in this case) is the main one.

We have the assignment submission plugin in work to use LTI instead of MNet. It's not quite finished yet though but can be prioritised if funding were available.

While people would skip the homepage, you could put some relevant information onto the dashboard. Furthermore, you can also define the landing page and thus don't have to take people to the dashboard.

Cheers

Kristina