Create a Mahara assignment in Moodle
Mahara can be used for assessment but its strength does not lie with essays but in creating a reflective learning environment, often scaffolded to support students through the early stages of developing their skills and understanding.
Mahara allows the use of
- A wider range of digital media (e.g. audio, video, graphics, text)
- Student reflection on the evidence of learning that has been gathered.
- Real-world context (work placements, group work, work-based assessment)
- Portfolios can be mapped against professional requirements or graduate attributes
https://manual.mahara.org/en/1.9/tips/assessment.html recommends Mahara for:
- Group work assignments
- Learning journals
- Fieldwork / practicum reports
- Problem-solving assignments
- Resource portfolios
For the most effective results, use
- Rubrics to assess the work created across a range of criteria
- Include formative feedback as part of the assignment process (from Peers and Tutors)
Creating an assignment using Mahara
- Design the assessment activity
- Create a template to scaffold student learning
- Share the template with individuals or groups
- Provide students with instructions to copy the template
- Create a Moodle assignment using Mahara as the source
- Provide students with instructions on how to submit an assignment via Moodle
Assignment considerations
Assignments are created with one of the following options, and each of these has implications and benefits for the assessment process:
- Students can continue to edit the page or collection
This is useful where tutors need to ensure that progress is being made. Setting checkpoints (in the form of individual assignments in Moodle) through the assessment, which may run for many months, encourages students to continually add to their portfolios rather than leaving it until near to the assessment deadline. It works well for formative assessment and gives the Tutor opportunities to feedback to the student before the final submission. - The page or collection (portfolio) is locked until grading is complete
Portfolios are locked when submitted and cannot be edited until released with a grade. This is important for summative assessments so that work is not altered until a grade has been issued. If a student submits a page from a collection to an assignment, or if the assignment is not released with a grade, the student will not be able to continue working or submit the item again at a later date to another assignment. - The page or collection is locked permanently
We don't recommend the use of this option. It permanently freezes the portfolio and students cannot edit, reuse or resubmit the portfolio.
The information on this page relates to Mahara 20.04 and was last updated August 2020.
Contents
- Introduction to managing course participants
- Make your course visible to students
- Check participants
- Enrolment methods and managing access permissions
- Enrol participants using Warwick auto-enrolment
- Manually enrol participants onto a Moodle space
- Roles and their functions in Moodle
- Switch to another role
- Create groups
- Create groupings
- Using group mode with activities
- Enable activity completion
- Mark activity completion manually
- Track activity completion
- Course completion
- Course participation
- Introduction to assessment and feedback
- Create a fail / pass scale
- Create a custom certificate
- Create and manage badges
- Reports, logs and completion data in Moodle
- Create an assignment
- Create an assignment for group submission
- Set up Turnitin within an assignment
- Create and grade a submission using a rubric
- Use a marking workflow for assignments
- Blind marking
- Allocate markers to specific submissions
- Provide grades and feedback for individual assignments
- Check the status of submissions
- Hide or show grades and feedback
- Introduction to eStream
- Access your eStream content
- Uploading videos to eStream
- Edit videos in eStream
- Edit video thumbnail
- Uploading a closed captions (subtitles) file to eStream
- Add eStream videos to Mahara
- Sharing eStream videos to Moodle
- Sharing an eStream video with a link
- Setup a video assignment in Moodle
- Introduction to Vevox
- Get help with Vevox
- Converting from Turning Point to Vevox
- Polling in PowerPoint using the Vevox add-in
- Polling and Q&A all running within the Vevox dashboard
- Polling in PowerPoint, plus Q&A
- Request a Vevox account
- Information about Vevox for students
- Use Teams with Vevox personal response system