Moodle: export to portfolio

As online learning platforms mature and develop, interoperability and mash-ups become increasingly important. As LMSs (learning management systems) develop areas of strength, no one single system will be able to do everything an organisation wants it to. A good example is Moodle: excellent as a teacher-directed, assessment for learning tool that allows students to collaborate on a task and demonstrate to their teacher what they do and don't know about a topic. But the e-portfolio features of Moodle are not as well-developed as something like Mahara, so when a student finishes a piece of work inside Moodle, they should be able to easily and quickly push that evidence of learning through to an e-portfolio (which, of course, they can).

Moodle 2.0 offers site admins the ability to connect portfolios to their Moodle site so that users can push content through. We've got our one set up for Mahara (http://myportfolio.school.nz) and this video shows you how easy it is for students to push content through.

Maharadroid

Thanks to Alan McNatty and the great people of Catalyst IT, Myportfolio.school.nz and Mahara users worldwide have the ability to upload images directly to their e-portfolio. Imagine the scenario of a student out in the world seeing and recognising an example of right angle geometry. They whip out their phone, take a photo of it, then upload it to their e-portfolio directly from the phone gallery. It's a great step forward in capturing evidence of learning out in the landscape rather than just in the classroom. Here it is in action:

Mahara has LEAP2A support!

Great news out of the Mahara community this week:

"The latest, and I hope last, of the betas for Mahara 1.2 has just been released. The biggest piece of news regarding this is that Mahara has full LEAP2A support - in particular, you can export your account from one Mahara, and import it again to the same or a different Mahara, and the new account will have all of the data (files, blogs, Views) that the old account had."

Simple as this sounds, it's actually a huge enabler for lifelong learning through e-portfolios. Import/export of portfolios enables a youngster to begin building an e-portfolio in an Early Childhood Education centre (with a bit of help), then have that portfolio follow them through primary, intermediate, secondary, tertiary and into the workforce. This process has also been enabled by the Ministry who has had the foresight to use Mahara to power http://myportfolio.school.nz/
It also means that students can move schools and have their portfolios follow them. Above all, it means a much better way to identify new students' strengths and learning needs before they enter an new school.
And of course at the end of the process, they are well set-up to share their achievements with potential employers who will employ them and pay them megabucks.
Well done to everyone in the Mahara community. This is a huge step forward for learning.

Moodle and Mahara integration

This is an old post, but it's the first time I've seen a screencast of this feature in action. It's SSO between Moodle and Mahara demonstrating the function of pushing an artefact from the assignment module in Moodle through to the Mahara files area. As I see it, this is fundamental to a useable LMS/e-portfolio system. Good to see it's on its way: