Mahara And Moodle - Love at first sight!
Today I finally got around to installing Mahara, the new Open Source ePortfolio system from New Zealand on my server. What makes Mahara so special, well let me tell you.
To best summarise what Mahara is about in a succinct paragraph lets her it from Penny Leach, one of Mahara’s developers:
Mahara means to think, thought, reflection in Te Reo Maori. Mahara is an electronic portfolio system that is designed to run alongside Moodle, and provide a student-centered space to create and store learning related artefacts, present them to different groups of people in varied ways, as well as some social networking functionality.
Mahara is the first portfolio system to start tying in with Moodle. as of 1.8 Moodle has included a Networking function to allow external systems to connect and share information with it. The logical use of this was to allow users to access multiple Moodle installs. But Mahara is the first external application to make use of this to allow for users to jump between two different web applications.
The integration is still in it’s early days as the new Portfolio API is not yet complete. Once completed, the new API will allow for:
- When portfolios are enable, every page or major piece of content in Moodle has a little “Capture this” button beside it.
- User clicks one of these buttons
- User is able to choose from a list of configured portfolios (this step will be skipped if there’s only one).
- User is asked to define some metadata to go with the captured content
- The content and metadata is COPIED to the external portfolio system
- User has an option to “Return to the course” or “Visit their portfolio”.
But for now the integration does allow for SSO (Single Sign On) and also brings user data across from Moodle.
Having just installed the Mahara/Moodle bridge I am starting to explore the functionalities and possibilities that they provide. I thought that I would share my discoveries with you as vodcasts attached to these blog posts. As I explore and better understand this application I hope to continue to bring these to light in the blog.
If you have questions or features you would like to see highlighted, please post them in the comments and Ill tray to answer them in the next installment.
Useful Links
- Mahara Homepage
- Portfolio API’s in MoodleDocs
- Open Source in NZ Education Article
- Why Use ePortfolio’s?
Filed under: Moodle, News, Plugins, eLearning and tagged demo, eportfolio, Mahara, Moodle, vodcast
No speech just music in the audio of that video
How does Mahara stack up against using existing standard Moodle activities for portfolio work?
- Eamon
thanx for that..video re-encoded and audio fixed.
Issues with portfolios inside moodle is that, at lest from a K-12 perspective, we normally erase student data to prepare fro the next year. Having an external system means that although the moodle is renewed every year, the portfolio content remains intact over the 5-8 years the student is with us.
Also the idea of a portfolio is to take resources further than just assessment. This allows for reflection and peer review. Lastly Mahara also provides tools not yet covered (wait til part 2) is CV creation and blogging.
We ran into an issue when we upgraded Moodle versions - Mahara versions didn’t keep up as quickly. We also did some usability testing and found that the user creation process what a bit tedious. We ended up dropping Mahara and doing a refined Moodle installation based on what http://www.georgetownprofessor.net/gportfolio/ did.
I still think Mahara has potential - we just weren’t there yet.
How do you think this will stack up against MyStuff, the OU’s E-Portfolio offering for Moodle???
http://sclater.com/blog/?p=46
Hi
I just want to tell there is an e-portfolio recently created for younger students and integrated in the Moodle platform in Portugal. If you have time take a look . I am interested in e-portfolios myself and moodle and that’s how I ended up seeing your blog.
isabel neves, Portugal
http://centroeducatis.net/esbmoodle/course/view.php?id=20
[...] MoodleMan blog recently ran a post on the integration of a new third-party tool with Moodle. It is an e-portfolio tool called Mahara. We have a number of groups on campus who have various [...]