So far, you have been looking at how you can use all the standard features of Mahara to put together your own eye-catching portfolio and work together with other Mahara users in groups. In this chapter, you are going to look at roles beyond that of a standard user.
In the first part of the chapter, you will look at institutions in Mahara and some of the things that an institution administrator can do.
In the second part, you will be exploring special course group roles, controlled groups, and the ability to submit pages to controlled and request groups for assessment.
In this chapter you will:
- Explore the options available to an institution administrator for managing members, including how to set up staff members in your institution
- Choose some settings for your institution
- As a staff member, find out how to set up a controlled group to which users can submit work for assessment
- Discover how to turn your group into a course group, using course roles
- Find out what a group tutor can do in these course groups and how to create one
- Learn how to submit work to and release work from a controlled or request membership group
- See an example of using groups for assessment of work
Mahara is, quite rightly, set up as a learner-driven community site. It is important for us to see a Mahara site as a space where learners with their own personalized learning materials can choose whether to allow access to them, or not. The learner can also choose whether or not to interact with other site users with reference to the materials they create.
However, this does not mean that there is no useful role for an administrator or tutor in such an environment. Here are some of the things that a tutor might want to do in an ePortfolio system:
- Monitor their learners' work and get ready to feedback on it
- Decide who's in and who's out of particular areas of the site (such as institutions or groups)
- Scaffold learners' work by creating templates, which they can work from and go on to extend creatively
- Have work submitted to them for formal assessment
- Allow others, such as teaching assistants, inspectors, or verifiers, to access pages that have been submitted for assessment
Mahara has provided the features needed to achieve all of the things mentioned in the preceding list.
In Neil's case, there are clear reasons for him to want to exert some control over the learning process. He needs to give some of his colleagues a way to supervise and structure the work that their learners are doing. In this chapter, you will look at how Neil can use Mahara to meet his particular needs. You will get thinking about how you might want to use Mahara in different institutions, for the delivery of formally assessed programs, and for monitoring project-based or evidence-based learning.
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Neil from Training for Work thinks: | |
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I have a colleague called Graham, also an Engineer, who is interested in using Mahara for his students. I would like to allow Graham to manage his own users in his own section of Mahara. Neither Graham nor I want to inhibit our learners' creative learning process. However, we do feel a need to manage some aspects of our users' work in a more formal way. We would like our learners to submit their work to us for assessment. We will then be able to give feedback on their pages that have been submitted. Most of the content will be locked until we release the pages back to the users. We can then ask them to submit their work again, when they have improved it, and we can invite external verifiers from an accrediting body to have a look. |