U of Sask ePort Project
Teacher Education: University of Saskatchewan
Currrently I am using Mahara and the ePortfolio experience to have students in our "Indian Teacher Education Program" (ITEP) explore and reflect on their development as teacher-leader-healers.
The notion of the teacher-leader-healer involves peoples' development not only in terms of their professional skills and abilities but also their role as leaders in schools and their communities. Through their involvement with their communities, which many return to, they also implicitly are involved with the healing of their communities which in the aftermath of colonization are often disadvantaged.
I was seeking a tool/experience that would allow individuals to social network, reflect on their professional understanding and do so in a way that was less constrictive allowing for people to express their "Aboriginal Voice." In other words their understanding of their identity as people of Aboriginal heritage fulfilling the role of teacher.
However, we are also in program transition through out our college and I have begun offering our Mahara experience to other undergraduate students in the non-ITEP program, as well as graduate students.
The use of Mahara in all these situations is not directed at assessment but reflection and knowledge building. However, we have created a set of outcomes (views) that students in ITEP can use as focal points for reflection.
You and Mahara
Our Mahara Usage:
How you found out about Mahara
At our university we have a campus wide electronic portfolio working group.
https://wiki.usask.ca/eportfolios/index.php/Main_Page
This group is investigating a range of ePort solutions for individual colleges and possible use campus wide. After some discussion I decided that Mahara most closely met our needs.
How you intended to use Mahara initially - what level of adoption were you expecting, from what audience?
This was introduced in the fall of 2008 to a small group of teacher education students. I expected the small group of 20 to learn some basics of Mahara usage and to perhaps put in some evidence for reflection. This was done as part of a class, however their continued usage was entirely voluntary.
This fall of 2009 two instructors will be using Mahara integrated into their course work. Planning is now underway.
It will also be made available for graduate students with a particular view to course based Masters students. Faculty will also be invited to participate (however I do not believe I will have many takers on this)
How you've deployed and used Mahara so far
At the moment we have a small G5 Macintosh server that runs about a 180 Gb drive where there are about 50 accounts in use.
How it's working out!
What problems you've found (don't be afraid to be honest! Honest feedback is good feedbck!),
What I am hoping to see that is in the works for version 1.2 is the portfolio export feature. I think this is key especially since students might use what they are developing in pursuit of employment. Pursuit of employment is not our main goal with the Mahara however. One challenge concerns the number of views that we could put up on our default page. We have about 13 learning outcomes for people to consider, so people must scroll through the pages to get to latter one's they may want to edit. I am not sure if we can code this differently or if there is a way to edit this configuration within Mahara.
I did find that displaying .mov files was sometimes problematic. And across various operating systems and machines the .movs would not always display. Perhaps in the future some type of self detection that alerts the user to what is wrong and what they should do might be of help. Sometimes with windows systems the need to download Quicktime botched up users computers. Perhaps there could be some sort of media handler that was within mahara that could deal with such problems. I know that is likely very unrealistic given the range of video formats.
What features you like
What things you'd like to see change in future versions