Craig Eves at Mahara Hui in Wellington, 20 March 2014 https://maharahui.org.nz/course/view.php?id=2

1. Multi institute Mahara
Benefits and Issues
Presented by Craig Eves at Mahara Hui 2014

2. Myportfolio .school .ac settings
 Centrally hosted
 Based on mahara - active since 2008
 Growth rate fairly constant - initially large growth- slowing down
 Allowed to belong to multiple Institutes in school site
 Everyone can create Groups –Admin create public groups.
 Custom themes for some institutes
 Single sign on for some institutions – Moodle, saml, ldap Moodle/saml
 Institution admin responsible for user admin

3. Number registered users school site
26434
36921
42530
44725
55527
64520
69624
72043
81349
85869
89167 90045 91259
0
10000
20000
30000
40000
50000
60000
70000
80000
90000
100000
Qtr1 Qtr2 Qtr3 Qtr4 Qtr1 Qtr2 Qtr3 Qtr4 Qtr1 Qtr2 Qtr3 Qtr4 Qtr1
2011 2012 2013 2014

4. Tertiary registered users
12529
13565 13718
14297
15025
18006
21915
22498 22580 22668
Qtr4 Qtr1 Qtr2 Qtr3 Qtr4 Qtr1 Qtr2 Qtr3 Qtr4 Qtr1
2011 2012 2013 2014

5. Comparison of sites
Tertiary
 Pay per user
 Assessment based
 Internal technical expertise
 Internal training – or contract
 Little inter institute
communication
School
 Central funded – ‘unlimited users’
 Showcase based pages
 Limited internal expertise
 Centralised training
 Good inter institute
communication
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
Friends Pages Groups
Average number
Tertiary School

6. Success factors
Support resources provided
 Initial free Face to face taster session around country
 Video resources created and shared by members
 Online resources - links
 Manuals = quick start, full, admin and user
 Site Discussion groups
 Contact me link for email support
 Telephone and face to face support provided

7. …..Success factors continued
 Low cost to institutes – free or cost per user, SLA with training and support
included
 Local developers able to fix bugs quickly and implement features
 Administered by institute admin – promotes ownership and have knowledge of
users
 Support of central body for funding and developments – less overheads
 Involvement of institute administrators to make it a success
 Able to trial for free
 Able to use content from other web apps that are being already in use eg Google
Apps
 Able to set up SSO to sign in with existing username
 Bug and feature requests from users are filtered by hosts

8. Benefits to client of multi site
 Centralised support available
 Allows for institutes with small numbers to participate
 Supports cross institution communities
 Able to have individual institute settings to keep identity
 Members able to change institutes easily
 spreads costs for development – wish list from many institutes implemented
on site
 support resources able to be spread across institutes
 Larger community available

9. Benefit to provider of multi user sites
 Administration – upgrades, fixes, settings able to be applied site wide for all
institutions
 Only one server to maintain
 Easy to share resources
 Suitable for central funding and also user/institution models
 Features developed are suitable for wide range of institution type

10. Issues
 Formation of inappropriate groups
– hard to control
 Reluctance to open institute to
public
 Deleting of portfolios when leaving
school
 SSO issues when changing servers
 Process for bulk transferring of
institutes not easy to follow
 Central funding provides some
uncertainty of continuation
 Usernames not unique between
institutes
 Difficult to change emails when
changing institutes
resolutions
 Can choose to allow only staff and
admin to create groups
 Allow institution public pages
 Users create backups – bulk export
of institutes – requires command –
limited file size
 Need to ensure new key generated
on new server
 Easier interface
 Rely on another payment model –
maybe per institute, sponsored,
longer term contracts, ownership
 Central id number such as NZQA
number
 Not require a confirmation

11. …. continued
Issue
 Lifelong access not guaranteed
 External iframes URL not
guaranteed to be stable so
embedding not guaranteed
 Transferring of portfolios from one
provider too another is not easy –
file size limits
 Large graphic files are being used
Resolution
 Have a portal that provides
unlimited access – require funding
or business model to support
 Have an alert to site admin when
this happens
 Increase file size limit for
importing
 Have a converter in mahar to
compress graphics

12. Opportunities for multi institute sites
 Moderation of work between institutes
 Multiple connections with external LMS
 Collaborative development of features
 Piloting releases of new developments
 Having Alumni institutions
 Links with employer organisations and professional bodies
 Accreditation of pages similar to Open badges
 Sharing of resources – maths videos is an example
 Storage of achievements – central repository
 More flexible/powerful search of others pages
 Responsive themes

13. Further ideas?
 Archiving of submitted pages
 More integration with LMS – to competency level
 Conforming to international standards for academic record, resume
 Mobile app with more features
 Save with timestamp to show progress over time
 Further integration with linked in or similar professional networking tool
 Continuing professional development plugin – total up hours and show progress
 Site for users not belonging to institute – alumni
 Responsive themes to device viewing on
 More built in tools for creating multimedia resources – video editor/recorder
 Adding more skin templates