Category Archives: Website Software and Design

Mahara

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I came across Mahara e-Portfolio software, found at http://mahara.org/, shortly after it was released about five years ago. At the time, the software seemed to have some potential for online learning, but it wasn’t yet suited to the needs of my students. In the last years, however, the software has come along considerably and my teaching focus has turned towards the trend of competency-based training. Both of these trends have made Mahara a possible choice for my online teaching endeavours. I have installed this open source software on one of my servers and have trialled it for some student projects. Mahara also apparently fully integrates with my Learning Management System (LMS) of choice, Moodle (http://moodle.org), so it looks like I will be developing some student and client projects in this software.

If you are in competency-based training and you want server-based open source software where students can upload, discuss and have their work accessed online, then you must check out Mahara open source e-portfolio software for yourself.

Online Survey Software (Open Source)

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Are you looking for software to offer online surveys? Look no further than LimeSurvey, found at:

http://www.limesurvey.org/

I trialled this software years ago, when it was still “PHPSurveyor” and it has come a long way in the last five plus years.

I installed the software on my server and began creating surveys in minutes. By midnight of the same day, I had seventeen surveys live and ready for completion by stakeholders.

I love open source and when it is server-based, even better. I would recommend giving LimeSurvey a try!

Moodle

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I have used this Course Management System (also known as a Learning Management System) since early 2004 – over seven years! It is extremely robust, being able to host more than 100,000 students in a single instance. It is open source (free to download, use and alter) and I would say that I have never had a significant problem with it, except for the recent upgrade to the substantially altered 2.0 version.

Moodle can be downloaded from http://moodle.org and it is currently used by tens (or hundreds) of thousands of institutions world-wide. It is a free equivalent to Blackboard and WebCT, and much superior, in my experience.

If you are looking for software to host online courses, corporate training, blending learning environments or any other number of online educational uses, then definitely have a look at Moodle.

Creating a Corporate Wiki with Dokuwiki

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If you are looking for wiki software to create a powerful and easy to use corporate wiki, then look no further than Dokuwiki, found at

http://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

While some will go on about the open source software that powers Wikipedia (MediaWiki), Dokuwiki is much better IMHO for many reasons. Dokuwiki is easier to install, template and use and it has the added bonus of creating all pages as text files on your server. What this means is that if you ever want to export your site or various pages, each page is sitting on your server as a text file. Deleting pages is also incredibly easy, as simply editing them and removing all content on the page and then saving has the result of removing the page from the site. A great feature!

While Dokuwiki is great for corporate intranets and some publicly accessible websites, it is flat file based – not database driven – so if you have a very high traffic website, you might want to look for other wiki software.

I recommend installing Dokuwiki on your server and giving it a try.

[Note: While this post discusses corporate wikis, Dokuwiki can also be a very powerful solution for your own personal website.]