10 July 2024, 16:42

Hi everyone,

Our next 'Mahara - AMA' (Ask Me Anything) session will take place on 16/17 July 2024. If you work with Mahara, be that as learning designer, teacher, instructor, support staff, or developer, join us for a live chat. These monthly Mahara AMA alternate time wise to make it possible for people from different parts of the world to participate.

Bring your questions and also ideas for Mahara to discuss. 

We'll meet on 17 July 2024, at 8am NZST. This month, this time would be more suited for the Americas. The Mahara AMA are not recorded, but I will provide a brief summary of the items we've discussed if anybody wants to follow up.

See you there

Kristina

14 July 2024, 10:15

Hi everyone,

Quick reminder for those in the Americas or the night owls in Africa and Europe: Our next Mahara AMA will take place in our BigBlueButton room in a few days on 16 July 2024, 4pm EDT (17 July 2024, 8am NZST). Come along to ask your questions.

Cheers

Kristina

17 July 2024, 22:30

Hi everyone,

Today's Mahara AMA was not just a time for us to answer questions, but also to hear about some great ideas. Let me recap some of what we discussed here.

Upgrade to Mahara 24.04

Please make sure to upgrade to the latest version of Mahara 24.04 that we released last week, i.e. Mahara 24.04.4. We fixed a few issues that we've discovered, including an issue with SmartEvidence annotations, since Mahara 24.04.0. If you are on Mahara 23.04, make sure to update to Mahara 23.04.8, which is the latest release for that series.

SmartEvidence and roles

In SmartEvidence version 1, an assessor needs to have the 'Staff' role in the same institution as the students they are assessing. SmartEvidence version 2 does not have that restriction. You can even define which Mahara role a certain assessor shall have so that you can give mentors who may not be classed as staff can also perform assessments.

Peer and manager roles: Do I need them?

When you share a portfolio with a person, you can give them additional roles, including 'Peer' and 'Manager'. These are only relevant if you use the 'Peer assessment' block and the 'Sign-off' functionality that moved to the page settings.

Using the 'Peer assessment' block, a peer can leave feedback directly in the block that you can place any where on the page. Thus, you can have a peer block sitting next to a block that the portfolio author creates rather than gathering feedback at the bottom of the page. A peer assessment block can also have their own instructions to guide assessors.

When you want your portfolio authors to sign off their pages to indicate that they've finished them, a 'Manager' could then verify them if that is required by the page setting. Altogether, if you then use the 'Portfolio completion' functionality in a collection, you can see all of these sign-offs and verifications on the first page of the portfolio.

Enhancement suggestions

• Assign an institution role when creating an account manually directly on the account creation screen. Currently, it's only possible to assign the institution admin, site staff, and site admin roles, but no other institution roles.
• When a learner added an annotation to their SmartEvidence collection, notify the assessors, i.e. those with access to the portfolio so they can check out the new content.
• Provide a facility for assessors to give more structured feedback on an annotation in SmartEvidence.

If you'd like to add your thoughts to any of these suggestions, you can do so on the issues I created for them.

Next Mahara AMA

Our next Mahara AMA will take place at the following times. Sign up for them to receive reminders.

• Mahara AMA August 2024: 20 August 2024 at 9am BST (London)
• Mahara AMA September 2024: 17 September 2024 at 4pm EDT (New York)

See you then

Kristina