Project Summary (derived from final report)

The project aimed to tackle three important development issues:
a loss across the whole college of 65% of students’ social space, thus creating the need to provide an alternative in the form of a ‘virtual social space’. Also identified was a need to provide bespoke e-learning training opportunities for teachers and to actively engage with known pockets of inactivity with regard to e-learning across the college. Thirdly, to address a need expressed in Focus Groups to establish a ‘Higher Education (HE) identity’ among staff and students within an institution that is predominantly devoted to the delivery of Further Education (FE).
With a view to achieving these aims, two major developments were
undertaken: the use of a Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to build a Higher Education Student Community Site. This innovation was of particular success with the part-time learners who were now able to carry out ‘keeping warm’ and formative assessment activities week to week, and to use the common room area for peer learning activities. Secondly, the adoption of Mahara, an open source e-portfolio tool to enable learners to build their own personal profiles, form groups and take ownership of their own space.

Moodle to provide single sign on to both systems.

Not using latest version of Mahara thus cannot pilot

Also using MS-Project

Mahara: student driven social network;

Moodle: for curriculum and tutor led portal to ‘meet’, receive information, updates and notifications;

Innovation Base link: http://www.innovationbase.net/app/model/view?id=126&m=126&currentpage=model

Using Mahara plugins developed under previous UWE project (Loughborough). Plugins connect Mahara to 3rd party services such as Flickr & YouTube

Using Mahara as a social network platform for students