When creating http://listovnik.sio.si our goal was that most of the teachers and students in Slovenia would start using Mahara for their ePortfolios. We are still far from that goal, but some teachers and students already started using Mahara.

Students often don't know what to do when they first get started and as a consequence they didn't fill in the information about themselves in their Mahara profile and résumé sections. This could potentialy be a problem since that is the purpose of Mahara that students personalize their online space.

Researching how other other social sites (especially LinkedIn) handle that situation gave me idea for implementing a progress bar plugin for Mahara. The plugin shows the progress bar of the user profile/résumé completeness and suggests further actions to improwe profile/résumé completeness.

The profile/résumé completeness progress bar block is added to the top right column of each users's dashboard.

Each user gets 5% completeness at the beginning (since each user account already cointains the user's firstname, lastname and primary email address).

Additional percentages of completness are assigned as follows:

• 5% for adding a profile picture
• 5% for adding any personal information
• 15% for adding contact information
  • 5% for adding address and country
  • 5% for adding any phone number
  • 5% pof adding any of web addresses
  • 5% for adding any of the messaging data
  • 5% for self description (either the introduction or the cover letter)
  • 10% for adding employment data
• 5% for adding a record to the education history
• 5% for adding a record to the employment history
• 15% for achievements:
• • 5% for adding a record to books
  • 5% for adding a record to certifications
  • 5% for adding a record to memberships
  • 15% for adding goals:
• 5% for adding personal goals
• 5% for adding academic goals
• 5% for adding career goals
• 15% for adding skills:
• • 5% for adding personal skills
  • 5% for adding academic skills
  • 5% for adding work skills
• 5% for adding interests

The plugin must be copied to the htdocs/blocktypes/progressbar folder of your Mahara installation and than installed via your Mahara administration »Extensions« page.

The plugin is available at https://github.com/anzeljg/mahara-progressbar and was tested on Mahara 1.5, 1.6 and 1.8.0dev. It should also work under Mahara 1.7.