03 July 2021, 17:05

Unfortunately there is no way to choose a specific record from the Education and Employment.
Having the ability to create an educational history and the same an employment history is really great and it could hold actually all kind of educational and employment histories,, even smaller ones. The same applies for skills a.o.

But when inserting an Educational History element into a portfolio page it is not possible to filter out educational records which probably might really fit in a job offer. The real power of Mahara is to create unlimited numbers of great looking CVs and introduction letters with ease.

Just as an example

I am a Montessori Teacher and when applying for a job in a Montessori School I probably would not be interested to list all my IT and Programming related records and achievements in the Educational, Employment skills history

When I apply for a job as a Web programmer I usually focus on those records which are related to IT, Programming instead of those of Teaching as a Montessori Teacher

When I apply for a job in a regular Secondary school I would like to present the Employer all my records related to teaching in a secondary School which perhaps are even no Montessori Schools (even I had build up a Montessori Kindergarten)

When I like to join a Band as a Trombone player or violinist or Sing a Song writer I probably would like to leave out all those unrelated records from IT, Programming and Teaching and Montessori but instead focus on the fact that I had composed several songs, created CDs, made exams as a Conductor and Trombone Teacher and as somone who even did an exam in Gregorian Chants.

Unfortunately until now it is only possible to choose ALL or Nothing. Adding a simple checkbox to each new educational Record - or even better to add the ability to add "Categories" to Educational, Employment and Skill records would be very helpful. 

How is that possible and how could that be added?

04 July 2021, 19:58

Hi Andi,

The résumé section in Mahara does need a bit of an overhaul. A community member has been looking into changing this section and is planning on making a proposal for that. Having more flexibility in that area would be wonderful so that you could keep a full CV in the system but then pick individual elements for a specific CV.

Cheers

Kristina

04 August 2021, 9:03

Hi Andi,

I've been working on some improvements to the resume functionality.  This was originally driven by the need to make the resume fields more inclusive but as Kristina has suggested it has broadened in scope a little to refine some other aspects.

Wondering if you've had any further thoughts (or if anybody else has) on the best way to approach sharing some aspects of an educational record.  I agree that sharing some elements would be great, just trying to think through how sophisticated that would need to be.  The category approach is appealing but I wonder if that we'd inevitably need customisable categories?

Best wishes,

Russell

05 August 2021, 13:52

Thanks Russell for looking into it.

The point is that usually you are not a mono focussed person which has many different abilities.
i.e. I am certified teacher in Germany and AMI Montessori approved but studied as a Hobby informatics which  finally led to the fact that I am running now a BOI certified software development company (even I never finished actually my informatics studies) but I am also a Mediator for Family, School and Victim Offender Mediation which now since I live in Thailand are no more so relevant to work here but since the laws for Mediation changed in Germany now again could be interesting for me even I live in Thailand (online). I still like to sing and compose a lot of music and songs for churches but also for children of not based on any religion. - so that is only a small of what I could do (taking myself as an example)

My Portfolio now olds all kind of records. I was speaker on conferences about educational topics but also about technology which had nothing to do with education at all or on Mediation topics which had nothing to do with education or technology. 

There are records when you write your CV to get a job or project at a school you like to show and present and those you don't like to show as they would be distracting the overall look of you as a dedicated teacher and on the other hand when I try to get a project at a tech company they are really not interested to read all about my Montessori and Educational achievements but liek to see that I fit into their technical requirements for their project. And the record company might be interested only in my musical achievements at all.

Having now the ability to categories your entries is one option another option would be to simply be able to choose (without that they had been categorized any entry in your CV and than probably even be able to restructure those to logical groups (via Ajax drag and drop).

Right now we can say - fill in my resume - bummmm - that's it - well ok we can check educational history, work history etc and choose if we like to present this or that. But that is not useful as in the educational records you have also all mixed entries like I described before and the same is the case in the work history. 

The process would be therefore different.

1. Choose what group you like to show on a certain portfolio page i.e. education history, work history etc.
2. Choosing what records out of those groups should be shown in your portfolio - now you could choose
3. Reordering the records you have chose to be presented in the CV so that get into a logical order for subtopics you decide
4. Having the ability to group those logical reordered items and assign a subtopic to it - i.e. my swimming records, my musical achievements, my sports trophies, my failures etc.

A Portfolio is a record keeping too but it makes only really sense if the data collected ca than be presented in multiple ways to different groups according to their focusses. 

The reason I mentioned failures above, as also those actually need to get recorded as they belong to an educational process and for a teacher or educator it would be very interesting to see actually what achievements and what failures happened when and how those failures got transformed later on in i.e. great products, services, ideas etc.

The biggest benefit for educators of Mahara is that you can record not only a number or letter A+ , or in Germany 1-2, 4, 6 etc with it but instead you can have a "title", description, records of all kind even with sound video images etc and that is so much more than only a letter or a number and it would really help the following teachers who take over a student to keep things on a red line and progressing the student.

For Montessori and Homeschool students and parents that necessity is even much more important as their students should learn by themselves to keep all records by themselves and than probably evening able to evaluate their own yearly portfolios! This means they need to be able to organize but also to reorganize their records at any time if needed. You can compare it like having an idea and because of an input of somebody else that idea becomes another idea and so on and finally a great product etc is the result. They ways to get there can differ a lot and until now Mahara has not got that flexibility to follow along.

On the other side in a Montessori and mostly actually also in a Homeschool setting you have another MUST HAVE requirement:

You have records which follow more or less a "Table" static - non flexible - called "curriculum" - 
Mostly the Homeschool - the Montessori Common Core and the Governmental Curriculum need to get matched too because at the end of a year the government isn't s much interested in Montessori or what you did in your homeschool but would like to see that you matched the governmental requirements for a certain school year and student. On the other hand you as Montessori teacher or Homeschool parent will for sure follow a much better curriculum which is perhaps (hopefully) not 100% governmental biased but in stead individually oriented on your child(red) and its/their needs. Until now we have no way to get that matching down as we can't regroup or choose single items from a block of records.

Educational history would be for a student the exams and the lessons he has finished but work history might include all the stuff he actually worked on to get to the point where he was able to achieve his educational record which than gets recorded in the educational history (and which could than also match the governmental required topics if you could match those.

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As you see the existing system could actually be reused for student records but instead of recording here only the major events - like final school exam, university exam, - now the test number 10 and 11 as well as the essay written in Biology etc will get recorded on a per school year or epoche term.  And in work history the way to get to each single of those (educational history) items would get recorded.

Here actually than comes "classifying" records in - i.e. assigning skills - and later being able to list all what had been done to improve a certain skill set - or matching the Montessori scope and sequence - or again matching the governmental curriculum - if you now could assign those to a certain record you would also be able to list all of one kind in a nice presentation for a certain skill.

The government could simply check the governmental records and would see immediately where a students learn to multiply 2 digit numbers and where he was able to translate letters from English to German etc and a Montessori teacher could see when a student started to work on the pink tower and when he actually finished and masters it. That Pink tower might appear in the students records in Kindergarten but than again in Primary and even later in Secondary school always in another context - While the student in Kindergarten was only putting a smaller on top of a bigger cube the primary student learned the decimal system with it and the secondary student started to calculate the cubic values of it. And that you have with lots of Montessori Materials. and in Homeschool settings too. The curriculum is a kind of a spiral which grows on knowledge with every single turn (reuse) of the same material but on a much higher level. Being able to see that progress is very valuable for teachers and schools at all - and also motivating for students as they see that they actually worked already in Kindergarten with stuff they will than fully understand and being able to calculate etc in secondary or even university levels. (One reason why the google Guys say that the fact that they were allowed to do already in Kindergarten - lots experimenting, failures included, reorganizing, organizing etc - made Google search engine possible and all what came actually out of that until now and we are not at the end of line now

Mahara cane that very powerful tool to record all those efforts in a much saver way (privacy) than ay of the meanwhile offers cloud solutions!