Hi Paul
I have created an online report within Mahara covering the project, which can be found here: http://mahara.sruc.ac.uk/view/view.php?t=ohNt54grnVAMCfKGqsHi
When we introduced the project to the Higher National Certificate (HNC) students, the new online Graded Unit assessment model was quite overwhelming for them to start with. With the support from myself (online technologies etc) and the lecturer pennies started to drop with the students as we went along. I met with this group a year later and they were actually asking me to design and develop the model for their Higher National Diploma (HND) Graded Unit assessment. They were extremely positive about the whole initiative! What I recognised is that these students wanted the easy option, within a Word document, which they are accustomed to. Once they seen they had complete ownership of their e-Portfolios, i.e. adding their images and video, they were engaged. It was hard work for them, but the end results were outstanding, as you will see within the online report above.
We also provided a brief introduction to the HND students covering the project, who were to be the anonymous peer reviewers, and they loved the concept of the templates within Mahara and using video and image evidence for assessment etc. At the start, they were very reluctant in peer reviewing their fellow students. We assured them that it was completely anonymous and once they were carrying out their peer review duties, they were hooked. The lecturer did provide guidance on providing (positive and constructive) feedback to the HNC students, and with the HNC students who acted upon this feedback did very well with their assessment. As, you will see within the online report above, not only did the HNC student's work throughout the course improve, so did the HND's...considerably!
Yeah, the students submitted their collection of Mahara pages to Moodle for assessment using the Moodle Assignment.
I did think about the students embedding their draft documents within Mahara and discussed this with the lecturer and she was happy to go through the drafts within the Workshop activities.
I also did think about the students submitting their Secret URL links to the Workshop activities. The students are able to hide their identity within Mahara, but we wanted to utilise the plagiarism tool (Turnitin) within the Workshop activities, hence why we had the students submit Word documents for the first stage. I actually think this method of the using the Word draft documents first worked better.
Cheers
Ali