assessing mahara portfolios in moodle: changes to the mahara assignment plugin

Presented by Aaron Wells, Catalyst IT // 3rd Oct 2014Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0

Assessing Mahara portfolios in Moodle:Changes to the Mahara assignment plugin

Aaron Wells (Me)

@AaronTheMad on Twitter

About Catalyst

Mahara: What the &$%# is it?

Mahara: the facts

● An open-source ePortfolio for education

● mahara: to think, thinking, thought

● Originated in 2006 as a collaboration between Massey,

AUT, Open Poly, and Victoria Uni, with funding from the

New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission

● Today the project is mostly managed by Catalyst IT

What the &$%# is an e-Portfolio?

“Mahara is a fully featured web application to build your electronic portfolio. You can create journals, upload files, embed social media resources from the web and collaborate with other users in groups.”

My definition

ePortfolio: (noun) A multi-user content management system.

Mahara's features in outline

● Users create “Pages”, i.e. webpages

● Managing, and creating the content that goes in those

webpages: images, files, blogs, etc.

● Pages can be organized into “Collections”, i.e. mini-websites

● Social network functionality to let users collaborate and share

content (all content is Private until shared)

● User groups with forums and shared content

● Comments & group submissions for feedback & assessment

What the &$%# is it good for?

https://flic.kr/p/4L5DkD

Mahara + Moodle =

“Mahoodle” logo by Iñaki Arenaza (@iarenaza)

The magic of open source!

The 3 plugins of Mahoodle

As a student...

As a teacher...

Mahara assessment w/o Moodle

A proliferation of plugins...

● Catalyst 1.9 (mod/assignment)

https://gitorious.org/mahara-contrib/mdl19-mod-assignment-type-mahara

● Catalyst 2.0 (mod/assignment)

https://gitorious.org/mahara-contrib/mod-assignment-type-mahara

● Lancaster University (mod/assign)

https://github.com/lucisgit/assignsubmission_mahara

● Portland University (mod/assign)

https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=assignsubmission_mahara

● Catalyst merged plugin (mod/assign) https://github.com/catalyst/moodle-assignsubmission-mahara/tree/moodle26-merged

Synthesis!

● ← Nicer interface!

● Better support for

drafts & exceptions

● Collections

● Unlocking pages

● Leap2A archiving

(coming soon)

Your gateway to the Mahara ePortfolio:

The Mahara community website:

https://mahara.org

The Mahara wiki:

https://wiki.mahara.org

The Mahara Launchpad project:

http://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara

(but it's usually easier to just link there from mahara.org)

About Catalyst

Catalyst Clients

Open Source Technologies