11 April 2024, 8:57

Hello,

Our May 'Mahara Ask Me Anything' session will take place on 21/22 May 2024 and might work best for the Americas and Oceania. You can register to receive a reminder before the session.

The session will be held in our BigBlueButton room at 10am NZST (check your time zone).

Thank you

Kristina

16 May 2024, 8:15

Hi everyone,

A quick reminder about our upcoming 'Mahara Ask Me Anything' session next week. There's still time to register which would give you a reminder email prior to the event. Alternatively, you can also join us in our BigBlueButton room at 10am NZST on 22 May 2024 (check your time zone).

Cheers

Kristina

22 May 2024, 10:17

Hi everyone,

We don't have anything to share from today's AMA as most people who had registered are located in Europe where it's already quite late at night.

Next month will be more conducive for those time zones when we meet at 7pm NZST on Wednesday, 26 June 2024. You can register for that Mahara AMA to be receive a calendar invite and automatic reminders.

Cheers

Kristina

26 June 2024, 21:02

Hello everyone,

We held our latest Mahara AMA today and would like to thank those that attended. It was good to hear your questions. We had a good number of them, and I didn't start writing them down directly, so I might be missing one or two. Apologies for that.

PDF export requires Chrome that some can't install

Unfortunately, as far as we know, doing the export via Chrome is still the only option at the moment as we are not printing to screen but also stitching pages that are in a collection together and exporting the files and making them available as part of the export. If you want to print individual pages, you can go via the 'Print' option on a page. If you know of a better open source possibility (that is compatible with the GPL v3) then we'd be happy to explore that.

HTML export brings along the entire theme

That means that it takes up more space on the server when portfolios are archived for submission as the theme is duplicated in each portfolio.

The export brings along the theme so that when the portfolio is viewed in a web browser it looks nicer than just with the 'Raw' theme as those exports are meant to be fully stand-alone and thus do not refer back to a stylesheet that sits on the Mahara site from which the export was made. This was done deliberately. Of course, that does add storage requirements when portfolios are archived for submission purposes.

The idea behind the archived submissions was though also to remove the files once a semester / academic year and then store offline rather than carry in Mahara forever, which of course often comes with replicated servers, backups etc.

Copying blocks

We demoed how to copy blocks. This requires that the copying block config.php variable is set. We did not make this feature available by default as it can lead to an increase in support requests if students copy blocks on end and then don't know how to delete them when they use a template because there the default is not to delete blocks. We'd love to hear feedback from those that do use the functionality on how they are using it, what works for them and what doesn't so we know that for future implementations.

SmartEvidence for institutions

You can restrict the availability of a SmartEvidence framework to one institution instead of making it available for the entire site. The suggestion was to also allow institution admins to manage their own SmartEvidence frameworks. We hadn't implemented that as that was out of scope at the start of the project now many years ago, and I can't remember that we had this request yet and thus haven't implemented it. In general, it would be doable to restrict it for institutions. We'd need to make sure that institution admins uploading framework files can't create frameworks for the entire site but only for their institution and can also only see their own frameworks. We asked that a feature request / wishlist items is made so we have it in the backlog.

Concurrent editing of group portfolios

When two people edit the same block on a page, the person who hits the 'Save' button last has their version saved and the other person's content, in particular text, is lost. This is known behaviour of Mahara because we do not yet have concurrent editing of content, which is a large feature.

The suggestion was made to at least lock the block from editing when someone is working on it so that those accidents can't happy. A feature request was asked to be set up.

Giving feedback within the 'Text' block

It would be good if text could be highlighted and then annotated with feedback. Currently, 'Text' blocks can't have any feedback at all. That was by design, to pretty much have a 'Notes' block light that doesn't have all the features of the 'Notes' block. At the moment, I'd suggest using the 'Notes' block so that feedback could be left there. Annotation text is currently not on our roadmap and the community developer who had trialed it hasn't submitted that code yet so we could potentially build on it.

What's the process for deciding on enhancement requests?

When we receive a feature request we review it and see if it fits the project overall how we see it, whether it was requested by just one person or multiple people and how widely applicable it is or could be. We then also view it against the roadmap and if it's extra, whether we can still do it or whether it would require additional funding, also in particular if an organisation wants it quickly rather than just having it sit on the backlog until our project planning might get to it. It's a combination of these things that help us decide where it goes in the backlog.

Put estimates against enhancement requests?

I asked the question if it would be useful to have rough estimates on enhancement requests in particular to give organisations an idea how big the request might be (with the information that we have available at the time) in case they do have budget and want to fast track the development work. Nobody was opposed. So we'll see how we can fit it into our workflow and trial it.

In Europe in November

I will be in continental Europe in November and would love to meet some people using Mahara. Therefore, if you'd like to organise a get together in your region, aka Mahara Hui (Mahara Gathering), please get in touch with me. My main travel areas would be BeNeLux, France, Switzerland, and Germany, ending in Berlin with the Online Educa Berlin.

I could imagine that we get together for a half day Mahara Hui, in meet-up style, so minimal admin and organisation up front compared to a conference and then have a couple of showcase presentations where people can show what they do with portfolios, you can hear updates from our development team with Q&A, and we can discuss things you'd like to be able to do with Mahara or have wondered about how to do it in Mahara.

Next Mahara AMA

I'm scheduling the next Mahara AMA for 17 July 2024 at 8:00am NZST, which would work best for the Americas to give those a chance to come to a live session.

Cheers

Kristina