Comment 1 for bug 1437291

Hi Domi,

Aaron from Catalyst IT (NZ) here. Kristina had me take a look at the proposal document you had for this. As I understand it, your use-case is basically:

1. Students create a group project in a Mahara group.

2. The project includes several pages & collections of the group, which are linked together via the group's about page.

3. When it comes time for assessment, staff "lock" the group permanently to keep a grading record

4. Students would like to be able to continue working on their group project after the assessment deadline (using assessment feedback) and they would also like to be able to share/publish the group project. They can't do either of these things when they are locked out of the group.

Is that correct? Also, what method are you using to "lock" the group? (Is it just, removing all the students from the group?)

It sounds like your proposed solution is to allow group members to export the group's pages & collections to HTML. Then the students could export that HTML copy of the group, submit it as a file attachment into Moodle for assessment, and continue using the live group in Mahara. Is that correct?

If so, I think that should be pretty much do-able. One stumbling block is that Mahara's HTML export doesn't currently handle CSS properly (Bug 1317435) but that can be fixed. Some other considerations:

- Which users should have permission to export their group's content? (Would there be privacy concerns about just letting all users export it?)
- Would students also need to export the forum?

There are also a couple of other solutions you could consider, such as:
- The ability to copy a group *within* Mahara (so students would make a copy of the group, and the assessors would freeze and grade that copy instead of the original)
- Adding leap2a export/import for group pages & collections
- Adding leap2a export/import for the whole group (pages & collections, forum posts, member list, settings)
- Add support for groups to the Moodle Mahara assignment submission plugin

However, I think your HTML export proposal would probably be the easiest out of all of these. Possibly the group copy solution would be about the same.

Anyway, please let me know whether I've properly understood your use-case, how you're currently locking groups, your thoughts on export permissions & exporting the forum, and whether any of the alternatives I've described are what you're really after. :)

Cheers,
Aaron