27 March 2025, 15:40

Hello everyone,

We held our 'Mahara Ask Me Anything' session yesterday and had a few questions come up that I wanted to share with you.

How can we get students into groups easily with as little administrator involvement as possible?

There are a few ways to do that in Mahara.

• Ask students to click a link in your learning management system to log into Mahara and then ask them to join the group. This uses the LTI login.
• Provide students the link to the group (in a course in your LMS), and students will be asked to log in and then only need to click the 'Join' button as they'll be on the correct group page. This requires that students can log in via the LMS as well as the Mahara homepage.
• Create accounts via a CSV file. This option does involve the administrator quite a bit because they'd need to create the CSV file. However, they can streamline the process quite a bit:
  • Create accounts via CSV.
  • Add accounts into one or multiple groups via CSV.
  • Automatically copy templates created in the group into students accounts, even before the students log in for the first time.

Another option would be using LTI 1.3 Advantage with the 'Name and Role Provisioning Service' (NRPS). In Moodle, the 'Service' 'IMS LTI Names and Role Provisioning' needs to be in use, and I'll document that in the manual as that option is not yet mentioned. Once NRPS is enabled, when a teacher or administrator clicks the login link to Mahara, a group is created with the same title as the course in the LMS and the course enrolments are brought along after a few minutes. A cron job runs once a day in the early morning to keep the enrolments in sync.

At the moment, we don't yet have the assignment submission ready for prime time using LTI 1.3, and thus need to do some testing whether the login can happen via LTI 1.3 and the assignment submission via LTI 1.1 or if there are any conflicts. If anybody wants to help testing, please let me know.

How can a student update file properties on a file that has been submitted?

When a file or journal entry is added to a portfolio and the portfolio is submitted, the file or journal entry cannot be changed any more so that they can't be updated after the submission deadline. Now the question has come up though if that rule could be relaxed so that students could update the alt text of an image, the description, or the license information. They would still not be able to delete a file or upload a new one to the portfolio, but do we need to keep file metadata locked?

I created a forum post in the 'Pedagogy' forum to discuss this.

Do you have some resources where I can learn more about how portfolios are used?

There are a number of free resources that I like:

• 'The learning portfolio: A game of snakes and ladders', published by Dublin City University
• 'Eportfolio based assessment', edited by Lisa Donaldson
• 'Exemplars of best practice with ePortfolio based assessment' at Dublin City University, edited by Lisa Donaldson
• 'Field guide to ePortfolio', published by AAEEBL
• 'Digital ethics principles in ePortfolios', published by the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force
• Mahara YouTube channel
• AAEEBL YouTube channel
• Our podcast 'Create. Share. Engage.' 😊

When is the next AMA?

We meet once a month for the 'Mahara AMA' where you can ask your Mahara questions. Here are the dates for the next few months:

• 22/23 April 2025 - geared towards the Americas
• 21 May 2025 - geared towards Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania (late)
• 10/11 June 2025 - geared towards the Americas

If you'd like to be informed about our upcoming events, go to our events page and click the 'Follow' link. You will then receive email notifications when we publish new events.

Cheers

Kristina