17 July 2024, 21:54

Hi everyone,

Our next 'Mahara AMA' will take place in our BigBlueButton room on Tuesday, 20 August 2024, at 9am BST (London). This session is for you to ask questions of our Mahara team. The session will not be recorded, but I may share a brief summary of what we talked about if anybody wants to follow up.

If you'd like to receive an automatic reminder about this event, you can register for it.

Cheers

Kristina

20 August 2024, 21:59

Hello everyone,

Thanks for the questions in today's Mahara AMA. The next one for Oceania, Asia, Africa, and Europe is scheduled for 8/9 October 2024. Before that, we have the Mahara AMA session for the Americas on 17/18 September 2024.

In today's session we talked about

• difference between site and institution settings
• group portfolios
• backing up portfolios and also going back to an old version
• SmartEvidence
• finding number of active account holders

Difference between site and institution settings

We illustrated that on allowing public portfolios and secret URLs. There is a site option for it in the 'Access settings' and there is one in the institution settings. If the site admin does not allow public portfolios and secret URLs, the institution admin cannot enable them. They are globally disabled. If the site admin allows public portfolios and secret URLs, the institution admin can decide for themselves if they want to allow them or not.

Thus, if the site setting that also exists as institution setting, is permissive, the institution admin can make the decision. If someone is in two institutions, typically, they'll see the more permissive option and that is applied to their entire account.

Group portfolios

Currently, you cannot export a group portfolio. You would copy it first into your personal account and then export it. Similarly, if you want to submit a group portfolio for assessment, either directly in Mahara or via the LMS, a student would make a copy first and then submit it from their personal account. Making changes to group portfolios is on our roadmap.

Backing up portfolios and also going back to an old version

We do not have a history function on portfolios that automatically saves a new version. We do have the timeline. It allows you to save the current version of a portfolio so you can go back to it and view the progress you've made since. You cannot bring back a version though and continue working on that.

If you truly want to bring back an old version, you can export a portfolio and then import it again at a later stage if needed. If you've submitted portfolios and don't make changes to the submission, they are also copies of a previous version of your portfolio.

SmartEvidence

We've implemented new features for SmartEvidence in Mahara 24.04. They allow you to have multiple assessors who's Mahara role you can set and give you an additional assessment status. you can define what these statuses are called in the framework file like you could do before. You can also change the icons used in a framework and replace them with another Font Awesome icon. We are using Font Awesome version 5.

• The colours are defined in the '_custom-variables.scss' and '_custom-variables-dark.scss' files in each theme (or just the parent theme if a theme doesn't require custom colours).
• The icons are defined in 'module/framework/lib.php' in the '$default_states = array(' part of the file. You can stack Font Awesome icons and thus combine two.

When you change colours and icons, make sure to retain the double encoding: Colour and another visual element for better accessibility rather than relying on colour alone.

Finding number of active account holders

If you are on a current version of Mahara, you see the 'active accounts' number on the reports overview page. Otherwise, you can find it:  'Administration menu → People → People search → Advanced options → Last login drop-down menu → People who have logged in since → Change the year to last year'.

Thank you

Kristina