Let's see an example of an assessment process in action in Mahara:
- As a staff member, create a controlled group that has course roles and page submission enabled.
- Add all your learners to the group that you just created. You saw how to add members to a controlled membership group in the Tutors section of this chapter.
- In the Pages section of your course group, create a page and make it copyable by ticking the Allow copying box in the page share settings.
- To the template, add a basic description of what the learner should be loading into which sections. Here is a very simple example of the kind of template you may create:
- Save your page when you are happy with it. It should now be seen by all your learners in the group.
- Encourage your learners to copy the template page to their own portfolio area. Here, they can make adjustments to it, adding their own information.
- When they are happy with their work, the learners should submit their page back to the group for assessment. Remember, the learner doesn't need to allow any additional sharing options for his/her page — it will be viewable by tutors and administrators on submission.
- You can assess a learner's work, choosing to add feedback to their work if you want them to review it and resubmit it to you.
- Now, in the files area of the group, you can upload documents and make them only viewable by tutors/administrators. One idea is to share a spreadsheet showing the marks for all of the students at this point — showing their progress on the course. This spreadsheet can then be displayed to people verifying the quality of the work (either internal or external to the Mahara site). This spreadsheet would need to be uploaded every time it is updated. See the next What just happened section for an alternative based on Google documents.
- At this point, tutors are ready to look at all the work that has been submitted.
- When marks have been decided, pages can be released back to the learners.
You have just looked at a simple process for how you could use Mahara templates along with controlled groups to assess learner evidence.
Tip
Monitoring and assessing learners' work
Many tutors giving feedback on a learner's work like to use the facility that Mahara provides to add a file to the feedback they provide. This could be a spreadsheet or word processed document giving feedback according to a formalized assessment criteria. Tutors can also attach audio/video feedback, if they require. The files that a tutor uploads automatically get placed in the learners file area in a folder called commentfiles, so the learner can add those files to their pages.
Other tutors like to make use of the Add to watchlist option, where a learner allows a tutor (or any site user for that matter) to watch and feedback on the way they are developing their page before it gets submitted for assessment. For this to happen, the learner has to share access to his/her page by allowing access by the tutor on his/her page's share settings. While a learner may want to engage a tutor's support in the development of his/her work in this way, he/she also may retain his/her right to choose for themselves which of their pages the tutor gets to see and which ones the tutor doesn't.
Earlier in this chapter, you saw how you can work collaboratively with your tutors to share the results of your assessment. We mentioned that you could share a file in the files area with permissions set, so that file isn't editable or readable by standard users (you probably don't want learners seeing the progress of and marks awarded to their colleagues). Another idea is to set up a Google document (spreadsheet or word processed file — visit http://docs.google.com), which contains all the results. Again, permissions settings would be important here and this could be linked to from a private page in the course group or even embedded in the group's About page, using the Google Apps block. This would perhaps be easier than having to upload assessment documents each time they are edited.
Tip
Link to a Moodle course
Do you also run a Moodle installation for your institution/business? Why not put a link to a related Moodle course page within the description on the About page of your Mahara group? This way, learners can access Moodle course materials whilst working within the Mahara group. Your Mahara site will need to be linked to a Moodle installation for this to work and for single sign-on to be enabled.
You also saw that as part of the process for assessment in Mahara, you may want to include people external to the group or Mahara site to verify the quality of work.
Here are a couple of ideas for how you could do this:
- Secret URLs: Encourage learners to create and send you a secret URL linking to their pages. These links could be collated and sent to an external verifier.
- Create an assessment page: The staff member for the group could create a special assessment page. This page could contain secret URLs of all the pages that require external review. This page could also contain links to a mark book in course management system such as Moodle to show results of quizzes.
In this chapter, it is important to note that, while Mahara has facilitated assessment of learning in this way, Mahara has no intention of ever becoming a Learning Management System or an eAssessment/eTracking platform. Moodle is a formalised course and Learning Management System, Mahara isn't. Instead, Mahara is, and will always remain, an informal and personalized learning environment.
One of the reasons Mahara is so keen on maintaining its symbiotic relationship with Moodle (http://moodle.org) is that Mahara sees the benefits of the integration of its own informal learning model with Moodle's Gradebook.
Useful notes on Moodle and Mahara integration (creating what the community have affectionately named a "Mahoodle" environment) can be accessed via the Mahara wiki at https://wiki.mahara.org/images/d/d5/Mahoodle.pdf. It is possible to submit pages created in Mahara to a Moodle course for assessment. Visit https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/System_administrator%27s_Guide/Moodle//Mahara_Integration/View_Submission.
It is also worth pointing out the extremely useful work that has been done by a Mahara partner in the UK, the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC). In a highly pedagogically-sound quest to promote the delivery of personalized learning, they have developed a personalization of Learning Framework at http://moodle.ulcc.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=139.
This framework elegantly integrates Mahara and Moodle with two Open Source Moodle Modules, which they have written:
- Assessment Manager: For progress tracking and verification of evidence towards formally accredited qualification (a significant improvement on the spreadsheet in the course group files area or the Google Doc mentioned earlier). Visit http://moodle.ulcc.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=140.
- ULCC ILP: For facilitating tutor support, including target setting and progress reviews. Visit http://moodle.ulcc.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=107. This ILP Module can be configured to "listen to" data sent to it from many of the popular Management Information Systems used by schools, colleges, universities, and other training providers.