01 October 2024, 19:59

Hi everyone,

Our next 'Mahara AMA' will take place in our BigBlueButton room next Wednesday, 9 October 2024, at 8am 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. You can also join us directly.

Cheers

Kristina

10 October 2024, 7:58

Hello everyone,

Thanks to those who came to yesterday's Mahara AMA. We've had a couple of people asking questions and a others who joined in to listen to the questions. You can join our Mahara AMA when you don't have questions as you may pick up something interesting from other people or might come up with a question during the session.

This time we were asked about SmartEvidence and if it's possible to give more people permission to create frameworks. Currently, it's only possible for site admins to do so. Recently, we did receive an enhancement suggestion for enabling institution admins to set up and manage SmartEvidence frameworks. If you are interested in this topic, please check out the suggestion and see if you'd like to add any other requirements.

Another question was around the translations for Mahara. The Mahara core team at Catalyst does not update translations for each new release, apart from te reo Māori, which is the official language of Aotearoa New Zealand besides NZ Sign Language (English is it only de facto). The translation of Mahara is fully in the hand of the individual translation teams who have the expertise to do the translations. Anybody can join the translation team and correct words or phrases or translate phrases that haven't yet been translated. You could check with a Mahara Business Partner in your region if they'd be willing to support the translation efforts for your language.

When students leave a university, the institution often removes their access, which then leaves the students to not have a Mahara site any more. Are we offering a Mahara site where individuals can register? Currently, we are not offering such a service for alumni or other individuals as there are quite a few legal and operational requirements to take care of that we haven't had the capacity in the team to review and sort out. It requires a business plan and then also a support team to answer questions, take payments etc. There used to be a few sites that offered ad-based free hosting or low-cost hosting, but they have either ceased to exist or are not on a current version of Mahara.

We have updated our documentation on how to report an issue or make an enhancement suggestion. I also pointed to our triage process. Mahara team members rotate every two weeks to triage reports and also forum posts to progress conversations. Initially, we may ask a few questions. So please keep an eye on your notifications from GitLab to respond to these. We aim to include the name of the person who reported an issue. You can check your notification preferences to ensure that you are receiving an email. The more information we get from you in the first place, the easier it will be for us triage an issue. Each issue report comes with a handy checklist that asks basic parameters, but please do add more information as needed that would help us understand either the steps you've taken or your technical setup. Sometimes firewalls or proxies play an important role and if we don't know that those are in place, we may not be able to assist with an issue resolution.

If you have any questions, you'd like to ask live rather than here in the support forums or in GitLab, you can join our next Mahara AMA that will be held in December or then again in the new year. 

Thank you

Kristina