When assessing work in Mahara, consider how you will provide feedback to students. If work has been submitted through the Assignment tool, you have two 'locations' where your interaction happens: in Mahara (through Comments) and in FLO (through
the normal channels of assignment feedback). You will probably need to use a mix of both, as appropriate to your context.
When in a student's submitted Mahara assignment you are able to interact using the comments functions, provided the student has not turned comments off. Each page
has a comments field, and some items of content also have comments enabled (Journal entries, Notes and files). As a visitor to the student's ePortfolio, you can leave comments here, but note that these comments are then managed by the
student - they can choose to delete them if they wish.
Comments in Mahara 'give' the student something they can use in their portfolio as part of their portfolio, for example:
praise for work well done
useful extra information, or
evidence of you having been there
Providing feedback and marks in FLO
Feedback that relates to your judgement on the quality of the work submitted and justifies a grade given is formal and should occur in FLO.
This acts as a record of your thinking should there be a grade challenge.
Saving work as a PDF
In some situations, you may need to save a submitted page as a PDF. This is an extra step and is not required for assessment records. However, you may choose to do this for:
a record: if a formal record of the work is required, e.g. for accrediting bodies
annotation: you want to annotate a page with comments (mirroring what you may do with a traditional assignment)
research: the page is a research artefact
example: the page is an example of work, intended to be shared or presented with others
Remember to seek and gain the necessary consent if you are saving a Page for purposes other than assessment.
To save as a PDF:
Click on three dots on the top right corner of the Page
Choose Print
This will open your computer's printing screen. Go to the destination box and select a PDF option. The name of this option(s) can vary but may be called 'Save to PDF', 'Adobe PDF', or something similar.
