15 January 2025, 13:59

Hello,

Welcome to the first post in the usability forum! We'd like to get your opinion on a couple of our content types, namely 'Text' and 'Note'. Some quick questions before I give you a bit of background in case you are interested in a bit of Mahara history.

• Do you use both or do you use one more than the other (either yourself or on your site in general)?
• What functionalities can you not live without?
• Do you create a note and repurpose it on other pages to update simultaneously?

Now for the historical background...

Initially, we only had a block called 'Text box'. There you could add text and that was it. The text only lived on a page, and if you wanted to use it on another page, you had to copy and paste it. That's why the 'Note' was introduced later on so that you could repurpose a note that was created on one page on many other pages. This was very useful at the time because you could pop instructions into the block and change them across multiple pages in one go. However, it also caused problems when a portfolio author didn't read the alert carefully and accidentally replaced their note content with other content and thus changed multiple pages at once.

So we needed a simple text option again that didn't come with all the options that were on the note, and hence, the 'Text' block was created that did not allow for reusability and needed to be changed on a page. This content type became more important and more used for some of our clients so that it received additional attention and now also has advanced options like 'Instructions' and 'Quick edit' to make it possible to update the content without going into full 'Edit' mode, preventing that the layout is changed.

In our mission to make Mahara easier to use, we are wondering if we still need both options or if we can combine them into one and maybe even drop some functionality, in particular the option to use the same note content in another page and have it updated there when it's updated on the first page.

The registration data does not reveal that level of detail to us and thus we'd love to hear from you!

Thank you

Kristina

31 January 2025, 1:40

Hi Kirstina!

Thanks for creating this forum.

I think combining the two would be great. As you know, we are Moodle users. Moodle switched to TinyMCE recently and if I compare Mahara to Moodle, the TinyMCE editor can do so many things (and more). In Mahara every content seems to need a different block.

I would prefer one 'text and media area'-block. This would probably replace half the Mahara blocks. In this block you can drag and drop text, images, videos, audio, etc.

Right now we can even drag and drop Word (docx) documents inside the text editor, and the text editor will open the Word file and import all content (images, text, tables, etc.) For more info see here: https://moodle.org/plugins/tiny_wordimport

I'm probably asking to much and go beyond your original question :)

But combining blocks: YES. Dropping some functionality: probably yes, but we should see if it is being used. Right now I doubt that, the text and note blocks are only used to add text to a page.

03 February 2025, 16:37

Hi Richard,

Thank you very much for your feedback. You can also add images into a regular text block. External video and audio files can be embedded via an iframe code, provided it is allow listed in the site administration. The separate blocks, in particular image, are still very useful as they give you quick access to the image metadata and comments etc. that you wouldn't be able to see so easily otherwise.

If you'd like to give the Word file drag-and-drop option a go, I think you should be able to just install the plugin as that is a plugin from TinyMCE that you would be able to then enable in the TinyMCE configuration. The current TinyMCE plugins are listed in htdocs/js/dist/tinymce. Let me know how it goes!

Cheers

Kristina

03 February 2025, 21:57

Thanks Kristina!

I know some options are possible, but I have to think with the mind of students. Even though we are a university, adding content using HTML codes (Iframe etc.) is not something many of our students can or want to do.

They are used to Social Media after all. From there, you can just film/photo something on your phone and post it online without much trouble. I seek that kind of usability for Moodle & Mahara as well.

I will see if I can get the drag&drop Word function working. I am interested to see where it would store the images that reside in the Word file...

05 March 2025, 9:56

Hi Richard,

I seem to have missed your update in February. Apologies. Mahara Mobile helps to record audio / video on a phone and send that to your portfolio area. Depending on how pages are set up, these new artefacts can appear directly in a page, e.g. if the 'Folder' block is used. It is not like an activity stream that I think you are talking about on a social media site. We do already have ideas around that but not yet the project for it. Enhancements to Mahara Mobile are on the long-term roadmap.

It looks like there's a paid plugin available for TinyMCE that allows for the embedding of pages via an iframe that should prevent that students need to go into the HTML source code.

Using the 'External media' block, content hosted on certain popular social media sites can be embedded directly using the URL rather than the full iframe.

Please let me know how your investigation into the drag and drop of Word goes.

Thank you

Kristina