I rolled out Mahara for the summer class I just finished teaching, and I couldn't be happier with the results.
The students (who are themselves teachers) constructed a set of Mahara views containing resources for the content area they teach. This was half their grade for the four week course (the other half consisted of reading assignments and discussions, and exploring a variety of networked learning tools, including blogs, wikis, social networks, and virtual worlds).
You can see their results here.
We're very pleased with Mahara; compared to similar activities done in HTML in previous years, these students generated more content while producing very few technical support requests. The fact that Mahara plays nicely with Moodle is an extra bonus -- the students already have far too many accounts and passwords to manage, so having one fewer to worry about is great.
Mahara: highly recommended.
Excellent news! I am planning to roll it out for my own classes as a pilot in the fall. We also will enjoy the single sign on from moodle. Looking forward to continued development.
atw
atw
The team here naturally loves this type of feedback! Very pleasing to see it going well. Of course, lots more yet to do...somewhat reliant on projects, funding, and community contributions but it is pleasing to see the the roadmap progress. We're very committed to Moodle so you will see the possibilities for interaction between the two applications progress over time. This is related to our ideas with MNet, which is getting some more attention at the moment - nothing like beta testing to identify the glitches.
A favour to ask of you Tony. As an early adopter with some promising results we'd like to link to your site from (a soon to be revamped) Mahara.org - perhaps also getting a short sentence on how your group has used Mahara. We're keen to show examples in practice.
Thanks again for the feedback.
cheers
Richard
Sure, you can absolutely link to our site. The students will be thrilled.
Tony,
I saw your posting over at Mahara and just sent out an email to staff hoping to show them how Mahara can be used this year with your student projects. We have a K-12 setup with 18,000 students and about 2,100 teachers district-wide. I am hoping to get several teachers going early on, but I think students will grab hold of the capabilities from the get go.
Here is "My Dashboard" view for Mahara which we are calling Community.
Do you know of any other examples of Mahara setups in K-12?
I saw your posting over at Mahara and just sent out an email to staff hoping to show them how Mahara can be used this year with your student projects. We have a K-12 setup with 18,000 students and about 2,100 teachers district-wide. I am hoping to get several teachers going early on, but I think students will grab hold of the capabilities from the get go.
Here is "My Dashboard" view for Mahara which we are calling Community.
Do you know of any other examples of Mahara setups in K-12?
Nice looking site, Chris!
I don't know of any other K-12 Mahara sites off-hand (although I suspect several of my students are going to be requesting it
).
I think you're quite right when you say that the students will jump right into it.
I don't know of any other K-12 Mahara sites off-hand (although I suspect several of my students are going to be requesting it
I think you're quite right when you say that the students will jump right into it.
Thankyou for this; it's all very exciting. We are unfortunately tied to our county broadband hosts for our school Moodle and they are working on getting Mahara linked to Moodle so we will get it at a point in time but not sure when -very keen though! K-12 - is that ages 5 up to 18? Am in UK so not sure.
Yes, K-12 in U.S. terminology is roughly ages 5-18 (kindergarten plus grades 1-12). Some areas also have preschool programs for kids younger than 5.
Hi Tony & Mary,
I am a teacher of Year 6 (10-11 year olds ) in the UK. We use Moodle, and I'm about to introduce Mahara to our school. We are using the single sign on to make it easier. I'll let you know how it goes!
Our wewbsite is www.marneljuniorschool.com
Charles.
Hi Charles
I am unable to get this link to work. I would love to correspond with you or anyone who has used this sucessfully in a primary or secondary context about this.
Many thanks
Clare
Hi Tony,
Saw one of your student's sites and it was very impressive. Is it basically a replacement of the profile/portfolio side of Moodle? Or is it more? I am excited because I have been hacking Moodle for years trying to make it more student centered and open to student publishing. Not much progress.
Don
Saw one of your student's sites and it was very impressive. Is it basically a replacement of the profile/portfolio side of Moodle? Or is it more? I am excited because I have been hacking Moodle for years trying to make it more student centered and open to student publishing. Not much progress.
Don
Well, I'd see it as more of a synergistic partner rather than a direct replacement for any part of Moodle's functionality. Moodle concentrates more on private (or semi-private) many-to-many groups, while Mahara operates more at the one (or a few)-to-many level.
The structure and group composition in Moodle are instructor-driven, while the groups in Mahara can be created by the students themselves in an ad hoc manner.
Both models are valuable and useful, IMO.
That's a little fuzzy, of course; both systems have features for operating in either mode (Moodle courses can be opened for guest access, Mahara views can be restricted to certain users).
Hmm... maybe a useful continuum would be:
Moodle-->Mahara-->Mediawiki
Moodle: has designated instructor roles. Instructors design and own the course and have full control over what types of interaction are permitted. Interaction is many-to-many (in a good Moodle course, anyway), but the instructor sets the overall tone and direction of the conversation.
Mahara: Roles are much fuzzier. Each user owns his or her own views, and has control over their content and how (or if) others can access them. Users can create their own groups and add others to them as they see fit.
Mediawiki: No real roles, as such. Anyone can write anything on any page. No concept of "ownership" of a resource (though of course the administrators can ban people for spam and such).
We use all three, and find them all very useful.
The structure and group composition in Moodle are instructor-driven, while the groups in Mahara can be created by the students themselves in an ad hoc manner.
Both models are valuable and useful, IMO.
That's a little fuzzy, of course; both systems have features for operating in either mode (Moodle courses can be opened for guest access, Mahara views can be restricted to certain users).
Hmm... maybe a useful continuum would be:
Moodle-->Mahara-->Mediawiki
Moodle: has designated instructor roles. Instructors design and own the course and have full control over what types of interaction are permitted. Interaction is many-to-many (in a good Moodle course, anyway), but the instructor sets the overall tone and direction of the conversation.
Mahara: Roles are much fuzzier. Each user owns his or her own views, and has control over their content and how (or if) others can access them. Users can create their own groups and add others to them as they see fit.
Mediawiki: No real roles, as such. Anyone can write anything on any page. No concept of "ownership" of a resource (though of course the administrators can ban people for spam and such).
We use all three, and find them all very useful.
Don,
The student pages were created using a separate system called Mahara which uses Moodle Networking to go back and forth between the 2 systems. It's much more than the profile. Blogs, file sharing, and the views you saw in Tony's post. Views are created via "widgets" with drag and drop editing of the content. It's a very slick system.
-Chris
PS. I would also recommend Deki Wiki instead of Media. Much easier to use and the themes are very impressive.
The student pages were created using a separate system called Mahara which uses Moodle Networking to go back and forth between the 2 systems. It's much more than the profile. Blogs, file sharing, and the views you saw in Tony's post. Views are created via "widgets" with drag and drop editing of the content. It's a very slick system.
-Chris
PS. I would also recommend Deki Wiki instead of Media. Much easier to use and the themes are very impressive.
I hear good things about Deki Wiki, but we've already got four years worth of content in MediaWiki.
I saw that they have an importer, but wasn't too happy about the "First, install Visual Studio" part. Ick, ick, ick.
I saw that they have an importer, but wasn't too happy about the "First, install Visual Studio" part. Ick, ick, ick.
At the University of Glasgow we are about (in the next couple of days) to roll out Mahara to the whole University (c. 25,000 users). We have been doing some testing over the last few months and have had some very positive feedback.
We will be heavily relying on the networking facilities linking it to our collection of Faculty based Moodles. This has required some modifications and improvements which we funded Catalyst to undertake.
In addition we have provided further funding to Catalyst to create a "template" facility so that staff and administrators can create initial view templates to give students a "start" where beneficial.
If anybody requires any further info about our experiences I'd be happy to assist.
Exciting times
We will be heavily relying on the networking facilities linking it to our collection of Faculty based Moodles. This has required some modifications and improvements which we funded Catalyst to undertake.
In addition we have provided further funding to Catalyst to create a "template" facility so that staff and administrators can create initial view templates to give students a "start" where beneficial.
If anybody requires any further info about our experiences I'd be happy to assist.
Exciting times
(atw is exceedingly glum, hearing about this, because Mahara does not seem to run on XP/IIS) Covetousness! Envy! Jealousy! 
Hi Howard,
I was wondering if you were successful in creating "template" views in Mahara.
We are looking at getting Mahara and are interested to create such "template views" to provide a guide to our student.
Did you end up using Catalyst to do that? If yes, how? Thanks.
Hope to hear from you soon,
Tuki
Hi Tuki - view templates and enhancements to groups collaboration capabilities are standard features of Mahara 1.1 released late last month - release notes.
We have been playing with Mahara on a minor scale over last couple of years and the features/usability have greatly improved. This year we have decided to start paying to use the hosted service www.myportfolio.ac.nz and have just established SSO between this site and our Moodle site. Very low-key use at the moment but will be working with tartget tutors/students next term.
Cheers
David
We have been playing with Mahara on a minor scale over last couple of years and the features/usability have greatly improved. This year we have decided to start paying to use the hosted service www.myportfolio.ac.nz and have just established SSO between this site and our Moodle site. Very low-key use at the moment but will be working with tartget tutors/students next term.
Cheers
David