Mahara

First established in mid 2006, the Mahara project started as collaborative venture funded by New Zealand's Tertiary Education Commission's e-learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF), involving Massey University, Auckland University of Technology, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, and Victoria University of Wellington.
 
Continued development has been made possible by further support from New Zealand’s Ministry of Education and the application of Mellon Foundation funds from the Open Polytechnic’s winning a 2007 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration.

Since July 2007, Flexible Learning Network has worked with Catalyst IT to guide the further development of Mahara.
 
A first guiding principle with the development of the Mahara ePortfolio system is that it is learner centred – a form of Personal Learning Environment. This is in contrast to the more institution-centric Learning Management System (LMS).
 
Mahara is a stand-alone system that can be integrated into a wider virtual learning framework. Unlike some pundits, we believe the Learning Management System remains a highly useful application for delivering learning. We also believe the overall environment can be enhanced and complemented by a learner-centred personal learning environment such as Mahara. Pan-institutional learner communities can also be encouraged using Mahara.
 
Mahara’s architecture is inspired by the modular, extensible architecture of Moodle. The Mahara team has also been heavily involved in the Moodle community, with recent work mostly focused on Moodle Networks. Similarly, Mahara systems can be networked together as well having single sign-on from Moodle 1.9 upwards. In a sense, we see Mahara as a ‘sister’ application although the two systems are not required to go together.
 
Going forward, Mahara will continue to evolve as a ‘pluggable’, modular ePortfolio system designed to leverage Web 2.0 web services and built with interoperability in mind. 
 

Mahara in presentations 2010 linux.conf.au 2010 - Mahara Development Workshop 2009 ULCC: Mahara UK'09 - "Innovation with e-Portfolios" and Presentations page and Keynote videos INTEL Symposium 2009: Workshop Mahara e-Portfolio by Heinz Krettek (eWIEsion, Germany) MoodleMoot Conference: Mark Brown (Massey University, New Zealand) The Story of Mahara MoodleMoot Conference: presentation by Penny Leach (LIIP, Switzerland) Using Moodle with Mahara eLearning Conference 2009: presentation by Alex Büchner (Synergy Learning, UK) Moodle & Mahara - Open Source Software in Education 2008 MoodleMoot Australia Conference: presentation by Nigel McNie (Catalyst IT, New Zealand) The Mahara ePortfolio System DEANZ Conference 2008: presentation by Andy Kirk Mahara open source ePortfolio Australian ePortfolio Symposium 2008: presentation by Richard Wyles (Flexible Learning, New Zealand) Mahara - Open Source ePortfolio 2007 OSCON 2007: presentation by Penny Leach (Catalyst IT, New Zealand) Mahara - Putting thought into ePortfolios

ePortfolio Conference 2009 (London, UK) Swiss OpenExpo 2009 (Bern, Switzerland)