For this section, you will need to be logged in as a standard user who has been added to your course group. Add a standard member to your group, if none already exist. As group administrator, Peter Tooley of Training for Work has added one learner who he knows will be taking his NVQ Level 2 course, called Ravinda Pavel:
- Log in to your Mahara as a standard course member belonging to the course group that you created earlier. For testing purposes, remember you can masquerade as a standard user, so do that if you think it is easier.
- Using everything you learned in Chapter 2, Getting Started with Mahara, and Chapter 4, Organize and Showcase your Portfolio, create a page that you think would be of a good quality to submit to your group for assessment. Save your page when you are happy with it. Ravinda has created this page to submit for assessment:
- Find the page that you created in step 2 in the Pages section of your portfolio and open it up.
- Where it says Submit this page to, which enables you to select the appropriate course group from the drop-down list, it is likely that you only have one course group to submit to at the moment. However, in the future you might belong to more than one course and want to select a specific group to submit to. Ravinda wanted to submit his page to the Mech Eng Level 2 group, so he selected Mech Eng Level 2 from the drop-down list:
- Click on Submit. Remember, you don't have to share your page with the group in order to do this. You can just submit it and it will be accessible only by tutors and administrators — not other group members.
- When you submit your page, you will see a box explaining that you won't be able to delete or edit your page until your tutor has marked it, click on Yes to finish:
You have just seen how easy it is for a learner to submit work to their tutor in controlled or request groups with course roles and page submission enabled.
You saw that the page, once it has been sent and is in the hands of the tutor, cannot be edited by the learner. This is true in the sense that the learner cannot access his/her page to edit and move their blocks around.
At this point we need to make clear that the page a tutor sees may still not be displaying exactly the same content that the user saw when they submitted it.
The reason for this potential variation is because the page may contain content that is being linked to, or updated. For example, if a learner has added a journal post or an RSS feed to their page, it is likely that they have added to their journal since submitting. In this situation, the journal posts in the page will also update and be different to those that were originally there at the time of submission. Similarly, any externally linked websites may be displaying different text/video at the time of assessment.
With that qualifier acknowledged, page submission is clearly a great assessment technique for a tutor. The tutor knows that the user cannot edit the page in any way other than those you just saw. This gives them time to look at the page, and to grade or assess it. When the tutor has come up with a mark for it, they are then able to (should they choose to) release the page back to the learner — leaving them free again to extend and re-use it in the future.
Tip
Copy your page before submitting
Once you have submitted your page to a course group for assessment, you cannot access it for further editing. It is, therefore, a good idea to copy your page before you submit it. This way you can access your work and edit it, if you want to whilst your other copy is still locked for assessment. It is also possible to copy a page after submitting your work, so don't worry that your work is uneditable forever. Remember, though, that when you copy a page that feedback for the page is not copied.
So, you've seen how to submit a page, now let's find out how a page is returned to a learner once it has been assessed.