Guest access to portfolios

[Scot Aldred]

If you read Attwell and others who are advocating eportfolio use, you will find that an eportfolio should belong to the students and that they should have access to this throughout their lifetime. Being able to create specific views for different purposes is critical to the success of this approach. Mahara is on the right track in this regard, however, there needs to more flexibility in terms of how those views can be shared.

My preference would be for instances of Mahara to be hosted by independent companies/institutions that provide low cost accounts for anyone who wishes to have an eportfolio. In this case the school/university/business could subsidise this cost for the period of time the student/employee is with the organisation, so there is an opportunity for the individual to keep and add to their work when they leave.

To this end, I would like to see the capability of inviting audiences, by email, to see a view of your portfolio by registering as free guest in the Mahara instance. This way the need to provide public views and secret URLs would be removed and a public view would then only be used for a wider audience when the portfolio owner required this to happen.
By bringing people to Mahara in a guest capacity you expose more people to Mahara and and keep the intimacy that is often required for specific purposes--not everyone wants a particular view to be publicly available to those not in the community.

Keep up the excellent work,

Scot.

This bug was imported from eduforge.org, see:
https://eduforge.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=3116&group_id=176&atid=742

[Nigel-catalyst (nigel-catalyst)]

Definitely an idea worth exploring. Secret URLs have their own usability issues.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Proper accounts for people in institutional contexts is difficult as experience has shown as IT often doesn't want to maintain those. However, there needs to be a way to authenticate "guests" to ensure that only authorized people give feedback on portfolios.

A secret URL is not a great way for that as anybody can pick a name.

These could be "on-the-fly" accounts that have a short life span, don't allow for the creation of portfolios or participation in groups, but only for the purpose of giving feedback. Alternatively, other options can be explored that don't require accounts.