Welcome to the October 2024 edition of the Mahara newsletter. This is our quarterly newsletter that brings you updates from our Mahara community and the wider portfolio one to keep you up to date with what's happening in our space.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 October 2024. You can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Do you want portfolio news on a more frequent basis? Sign up for the Catalyst Mahara newsletter that is delivered to your inbox every first Wednesday of the month.

All news by Kristina Höppner (Catalyst IT, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Welcome to new Mahara Business Partner DM Solutions

We'd like to welcome the German company DM Solutions to the group of Mahara Business Partners that are authorised to sell Mahara subscriptions in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. With more than 15 years of industry experience, DM Solutions offers a comprehensive range of services related to Mahara. From installation and maintenance to support and the design of your individual Mahara environment, they provide all services from one single source. We are excited to have them on board to support organisations working with Mahara.

 If you cannot purchase a subscription directly from the Mahara team in New Zealand, get in touch with a business partner near you who is authorised to sell subscriptions in their respective region.

Stories from our community

Since our last newsletter, six podcast episodes have gone live, with another one being released tomorrow, 2 October 2024. I'm always excited to talk to practitioners, researchers, and students about their portfolio work, how they view it, and what they find most useful to them. Let's recap those recent who I talked to recently:

• Allison Miller from Digital Capability: She leads the ePortfolios Australia community of practice that puts on the Eportfolio Forum every year besides a number of webinars and their portfolio working sessions, called PARE.
• Derrin Kent from The Development Manager: Derrin remains completely committed to using portfolios with his apprentices, degree apprentices, and Skills Bootcamp participants.
• Zala Volcic from Monash University: Zala and her team implemented portfolios in the Bachelor of Media Communication, focussing on community and relationships
• Patsie Polly from University of New South Wales: She's been using portfolios for a long time for work-integrated learning activities in biomedicine and is always innovating on her approach.
• Sheetal Patel from Stanford University, LinkedIn Learning, Aha! >>Opportunities, and Ninety-Five Z: Sheetal and the Integrative Learning Portfolio Lab team support students in creating mainly public-facing portfolios to help them secure internships and jobs. They created a framework to help students in their reflection and portfolio process
• Jonathan Murphy from Griffith College: He started out using portfolios in degree apprenticeships and has plans to introduce them in many different areas at his college, including promotion processes
• Cathy Elliott from University College London (to be released on 2 October 2024): She catches us up on what she's been doing with portfolios since our last interview in May of last year. It's exciting times at UCL because the Geography Department is going live with a new first year experience entirely based around the portfolio process.

Listen to our audio podcast in your favourite podcast player or on our podcast website. If you'd like to share feedback about the podcast or want to share your own story, please get in touch with me. I'd love to chat with you.

Upcoming events

Mahara AMA, 9 October 2024

Our next 'Mahara Ask Me Anything' session will take place online on 9 October 2024, 8-9pm NZDT. It's an opportunity for you to chat with our Mahara team at Catalyst in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington about - well, anything Mahara related. We've been using these sessions to talk about enhancements, learn about features that might be good to use in particular workflows, checked if a bug was an issue that we could replicate, and figured out otherwise gnarly questions that can be difficult to ask on the forums without the possibility of a screen share.

November Mahara AMA will take place in person in Europe at various organisations that I look forward to visiting. The last AMA for this year will take place on 4 December 2024, 8-9am NZDT (3 December afternoon for the Americas).

Maximaliseer Je leerervaring met de Portfolio Mahara, 9 October 2024

Our Business Partner OpenEdu is offering the webinar 'Maximaliseer Je leerervaring met de Portfolio Mahara (Maximise your learning experience with Mahara)' in Dutch on 9 October 2024 at 3:00pm. This is an introduction to Mahara that will also cover the integration with Moodle. Registration for the webinar next week.

AAEEBL ePortfolio Retreat, 18 October 2024

The first AAEEBL ePortfolio Retreat will take place in person at Dominican University of California in San Rafael on 18 October 2024. This event gives the opportunity to learn, share, explore, experiment, and brainstorm all in service of better learning experiences using portfolios. If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and have time that day, come along to the retreat to catch up with portfolio friends and meet new ones. The day is intentionally conversational yet at the end also offers the opportunity to think about participating in a scholarly publication. Register for the retreat.

MoodleMoot Global, 22-24 October 2024

This year's MoodleMoot Global will be held in Mérida in México from 22 to 24 October 2024. Since many organisations use both Mahara and Moodle, it's a great opportunity to catch up. Find me and other Catalystas at the event and let's chat.

Working together for change: Digital education meets the climate and nature emergencies, 12/13 November 2024

The online workshop 'Working together for change: Digital education meets the climate and nature emergencies' is a collaboration between Flexible Learning Association of New Zealand (FLANZ) and the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) to look at how we can work together to effect positive change to address the climate and nature crises within a digital education context. This workshop will be facilitated by Geraldine Foley (UCL), Irina Niculescu (UCL), Dominic Pates (City St George's University of London), and Roger Rees (Univesity of Surrey). Register for this webinar that will be held on 12 November 2024 at 8pm London time.

Past events

Mahara Hui Tāmaki Makaurau, 4 September 2024

At the start of September the Mahara team ventured to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland to meet up with community members for a half day hui (te reo Māori for 'gathering). It was a lovely chance to speak to each other without screens, share lunch, and have wonderful conversations around how Mahara is used in particular in healthcare and what features might be of interest. We are planning on holding similar events twice a year in Aotearoa New Zealand, one being an online hui and another one an in-person one to facilitate catch-ups amongst our community.

Our marketing colleague Courtney Brown came along as well and shares what she learned on the day.

EPEPLA Workshop: E-Portfolio Evolution Powered by Language Analysis, 9 September 2024

The EPEPLA workshop, chiefly organised by Paul Libbrecht from the AISOP project took place on 9 September 2024. A number of German project partners that use explore the artificial intelligence space in regards to portfolios gathered to discuss their current projects and thinking and engage in conversations around potential futures. The notes from the workshop along with the recorded sessions are accessible from the workshop website.

Mahara in development

In the first half of the year, one of our business analysts at Catalyst, Rob Hill, conducted a series of interviews with community members on their use of Mahara. These insights are a great resource for our refresh of Mahara that is on our roadmap. In this video, Rob provides a walk-through of the refresh of the information architecture of Mahara that has been received very favourable amonst community members to whom we talked. The next step, which our graphic designer Evonne Cheung is currently working on, is the imagine a new look on top of that base architecture.

Welcome to the July 2024 edition of the Mahara newsletter. We'd like to share stories from our community and also upcoming events with you. If you haven't been able to attend some portfolio events, watch out for recordings to catch up on.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 October 2024. You can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Do you want portfolio news on a more frequent basis? Sign up for the Catalyst Mahara newsletter that is delivered to your inbox every first Wednesday of the month.

All news by Kristina Höppner (Catalyst IT, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Welcome to new Mahara Business Partner Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne

We'd like to welcome Université de Reims as newest Business Partner. This French university offers to sell Mahara subscriptions to its ESUP Portail clients. ESUP Portail has a SaaS offering to facilitate the installation and maintenance of Mahara for organisations along with providing implementation support. We are thrilled to have the Université de Reims team on board and look forward to conversations with them and their clients around Mahara.

 If you cannot purchase a subscription directly from the Mahara team in New Zealand, get in touch with a business partner near you who is authorised to sell subscriptions in their respective region.

Portfolio practice at various organisations

We are at episode 47 of our podcast 'Create. Share. Engage.' It's awesome to hear all these stories from the wider portfolio community on how portfolios are supporting learning and impacting students.  If you haven't listened yet, find it in your favourite audio podcast player, and let me know what you think.

Recently, I interviewed two students, Mark Brady and Mario A. Peraza, who used portfolios quite differently. Mark had the journalling down, and Mario sought support from generative AI to help fine tune his message in his public portfolio.

If you'd like to share how you are using portfolios, please get in touch with me. I'd love to chat with you.

Mahara 24.04 release

At the end of April, our Catalyst team released Mahara 24.04, which comes with a series of new features, including:

• Enhancements to SmartEvidence to have multiple assessors and an additional assessment status
• The continuing professional development plugin is now part of Mahara core
• Retrieve deleted text
• Show recently used content types
• Copy blocks
• Embed Riff
• View Mahara in dark mode ('Raw' and 'Default' themes)
• Easily report issues to an administrator

Watch the feature release video for a quick overview or the longer webinar recording for a walk-through of the features.

Thanks go to everyone who participated in this release, be that through conversations an discussions, code contributions, translations, infrastructure support, and also financial support for specific features. Many thanks also to all subscribers. Their financial support enables our team to fix issues, maintain the project infrastructure, and also create new features from our roadmap.

Upcoming events

Webinar on programmatic assessment with ePortfolio thinking, 4 July 2024

Learning designers have been advocating for a programmatic assessment approach to make assessments more meaningful. EPortfolios play a large part in that approach, and ePortfolios Australia has brought experts together to share their experiences on 4 July 2024, 7:00-8:15pm Sydney time. Register for this free webinar with Heather Pate and Janica Jamieson (Edith Cowan University), Kate Mitchell (University of Melbourne), and Michael Sankey (Charles Darwin University). 

Online PARE session, 25 July 2024

ePortfolios Australia offers sessions that focus on creating your very own portfolio, having scheduled time to work on it. They are called PARE: Plan, act, reflect, and ePortfolio. This is your time to work on your own portfolio, whether you are ready to get started, need some time to elaborate your thoughts and reflections, or are close to the finish line. No matter the stage you are in, you'll be supported by others during the session and can grow your network.

The next session is scheduled for 25 July 2024, 1:00-2:30pm Sydney time and you can register for this PARE session.

AAEEBL Annual Meeting, 14-16 August 2024

The AAEEBL Annual Meeting is scheduled as in-person meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, in the United States, from 14 to 16 August 2024. This year's theme is 'The Role of Reflection in ePortfolio Learning: Documenting Community Best Practices'.  "Sessions will be curated to focus on various facets of reflection, enabling attendees to contribute to a new publication, the Field Guide to Reflection in ePortfolios."

Watch the website for programme and registration information.

Eportfolio Forum, 10-11 September 2024

This year's Eportfolio Forum, lucky number 13, takes place again as hybrid event, allowing for in-person and online participation. The venue for the in-person sessions is the University of Southern Queensland’s Toowoomba campus. The theme is 'Humanistic, Holistic, Realistic'.

The overall Eportfolio Forum schedule is online and registration will open soon.

Past events

• Panel conversation 'Transforming the ePortfolio landscape: Platform providers' perspectives on AI'
• Webinar 'AI-supported observations of e-portfolios: AI for portfolio feedback and assessment'
• Webinar 'From research to application: ePortfolio practice across the disciplines'

Welcome to the April 2024 edition of the Mahara newsletter. It is release month and therefore quite busy at Mahara HQ. Come along to our community sessions to ask questions and also learn about the new features that will be released by the end of April in Mahara 24.04.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 July 2024. You can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Do you want portfolio news on a more frequent basis? Sign up for the Catalyst Mahara newsletter that is delivered to your inbox every first Wednesday of the month.

All news by Kristina Höppner (Catalyst IT, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Welcome to new Mahara Business Partner EDUTECSOL

Education Technology Solution (EDUTECSOL) in Switzerland is our newest Mahara business partner who is also a reseller of Mahara subscriptions in the country. If you cannot purchase a subscription directly from the Mahara team in New Zealand, get in touch with a business partner near you who is authorised to sell subscriptions in their respective region.

Mahara on social media

Have you already checked out our Mahara page on LinkedIn? We post updates there on a regular basis, and you are welcome to share your own events and thoughts around Mahara there as well. You can also find us on Mastodon if you prefer that platform.

Portfolios in use

Are you a listener of our podcast 'Create. Share. Engage.'? If so, I'd love for you to leave a review in your podcast player or email me if you prefer. I'm stoked that I have the chance to interview a lot of fantastic people for the podcast, learning more about their ideas for portfolios and what has been working for them. There are more interviews in store for you this year.

If you'd like to share your own portfolio story, please get in touch with me. I'd love to chat. New episodes are released every other Wednesday, New Zealand time, with the next one due in just a couple of days. You can listen to 'Create. Share. Engage.' in your podcast player or on the podcast's website.

Mahara roadmap

In December 2023 we introduced the Mahara roadmap that covers the next few years. All items have been transferred to our issue tracker to which subscribers have access. We'd like to invite you to add your ideas to the items and what's most relevant to you. You will have access to some enhancements already in Mahara 24.04, and we look forward to exploring the others and how best to implement them together with you.

Mahara 24.04 release

Later this week, we will announce the preview version of Mahara 24.04 and would like to invite you to give it a go either on our development instance or on your own infrastructure. You can check out the new features before they go live and help us iron out last minute issues that you see during your testing. So watch out for an announcement in the 'News' forum.

Upcoming events

We have a number of events planned for you around the new features of Mahara 24.04, any Mahara questions you may have, and are also present at community events over the next while.

AAEEBL webinar with portfolio platform providers, 15/16 April 2024

The AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force organised a webinar with select platform providers to talk about portfolios and artificial intelligence. Bring your questions to that conversation or watch the recording if you are not able to attend live on 15/16 April 2024.

Mahara Ask Me Anything sessions

In the past we had developer meetings to catch up with community members. We are re-starting these, but as 'Mahara AMA', Mahara Ask Me Anything' sessions as we'd like to hear from all community members and want to invite everyone, no matter whether they are technical support staff, learning designers, educators, student support staff etc. Come along with your questions.

These sessions are not recorded at this stage, but a brief summary will be sent afterwards that includes links that were discussed or resources shared. Registration for these sessions is optional, but allow you to receive a reminder email.  The sessions alternate in their time zone to make it more easily possible for community members in different regions of the world to participate.

We will always announce the sessions in the Mahara 'News' forum, which will also have the link. Here are the registration links for our upcoming sessions:

• Mahara AMA April 2024 (Asia, Africa, Europe)
• Mahara AMA May 2024 (Oceania, Americas)
• Mahara AMA June 2024 (Asia, Africa, Europe)

New features in Mahara 24.04 sessions

I have scheduled three sessions to introduce the new features of Mahara 24.04 to suit different time zones. Come along to one of the sessions to learn about the new features and start thinking about how you might like to use them yourself.

You can register for the sessions, and I look forward to seeing you at one of the events.

Happy new year from the Mahara team in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, where it seems like we've already had four seasons in less than a day at the start of this year 2024: Heavy wind, not so warm summer temperatures, torrential rain, and now a brilliantly calm and sunny summer day. No matter where you are, all the best to you, your family, and whānau for a year ahead that is one day longer this time around. We look forward to having conversations with you around all things portfolios.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 April 2024. You can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Do you want portfolio news on a more frequent basis? Sign up for the Catalyst Mahara newsletter that is delivered to your inbox every first Wednesday of the month.

All news by Kristina Höppner (Catalyst IT, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Welcome new Mahara Business Partners

With the introduction of the subscription model, we've been able to welcome new business partners to the group of organisations that offer commercial support services to community members. These businesses can sell subscriptions in the regions in which they operate, often making it easier for institutions to purchase a subscription.

If you cannot purchase a subscription directly from the Mahara team (via Catalyst.Net in New Zealand), you may wish to get in touch with a company near you who is authorised to sell subscriptions in their respective region:

• Catalyst IT Australia: Australia
• Catalyst IT Canada: North America
• Catalyst IT Europe: Europe, Middle East, Africa
• Catalyst IT Ireland: European Union and other European countries
• CoSector - University of London: United Kingdom
• Datavenir: France, Belgium, Switzerland, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso
• eLeDia: Austria, Germany, Switzerland
• Enovation: Ireland
• Essington ITS: United Kingdom
• OpenEdu: Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands
• Open LMS: U.S.A.
• ssystems: Germany

Mahara on social media

At the end of last year, we launched our Mahara page on LinkedIn to provide regular updates on on Mahara and also other portfolio related items, in particular sharing the work of portfolio community members whom I have interviewed on the podcast 'Create. Share. Engage.' This year, we will continue sharing content regularly about Mahara but also portfolio practice in general on LinkedIn instead of X (Twitter). Our X account will remain in place for the time being, but I won't be posting updates there any more.

If you prefer a more open platform to LinkedIn, I will continue to post updates on Mastodon and would love to know who's using that as primary social media platform so we can connect.

Portfolios in use

In our podcast 'Create. Share. Engage.' portfolio practitioners and researchers share stories of portfolio use at their organisations, why they are using portfolios, and what they have learned along the way. The interviews cover a wide range of portfolio implementation questions and also give insight into early uses of portfolios back in the day when 'electronic' meant to burn things on CD-ROM. More about that in the first episode of 2024 with Ruth Cox and Kevin Kelly that will be released next week, on 10 January 2024.

The last episode of 2023 was a re-post of an interview from the 'Think UDL' podcast in which Kevin Kelly and I talked with Lillian Nave about the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Principles for ePortfolios and their connection to the UDL (Universal Design for Learning) Guidelines. We highlight how both are closely related and how educators and portfolio creators can make use of them in their portfolio work.

If you'd like to share your portfolio story, please get in touch with me. New episodes are released every other Wednesday, New Zealand time, starting again next week. You can listen to 'Create. Share. Engage.' in your podcast player or on the podcast's website.

I'd like to thank everyone who's listened in this past year and also who's talked about their portfolio journey. While the annual overview says we didn't quite reach 2,500 downloads, we did achieve that number in December! If you've already listened to one or more episodes, let me know what you think or leave a review through your podcast player. I'd love to know what you liked and what you'd like to hear more about.

Mahara in development

In December 2023 I ran a number of roadmap sessions, introducing ideas for our short-term, medium-term, and long-term ideas for Mahara. If you haven't been able to attend, you can watch the video. Make sure to check out the description for additional resources, in particular the Padlet where you can interact with the roadmap items and let us know which areas interest you most and on which elements you want to collaborate. You can also email me directly.

The items on the roadmap that you see have been identified through conversations with community members and watching the overall portfolio space. Since we have not been able to talk with everyone though, are there items that we are missing that should be put forward for discussion? Are there things that you are working on that would benefit the field and should be considered for inclusion in Mahara?

Welcome to the last newsletter for 2023. We'll share information about the Mahara subscriptions, outlook on new features, and upcoming events in the portfolio community.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 January 2024. You can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

All news by Kristina Höppner (Catalyst IT, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Mahara on social media

Mahara goes LinkedIn. Recently, we launched our Mahara page on LinkedIn to make it easier for community members who are active on that platform to engage. If you haven’t already connected with us on LinkedIn, head over to our page and follow it to keep up to date on all things Mahara.

If LinkedIn is not your jam, we also post updates on the Fediverse / Mastodon for those that prefer a more open platform.

Mahara subscription

Since the introduction of the subscriptions for Mahara to gain access to the code base and thus the latest maintenance releases and Mahara 23.04, we've had some wonderful conversations with organisations small and large. We are grateful for the support that our community have shown already to purchase subscriptions and thus support the project. There are two subscription options available:

• For organisations. This is the normal subscription for the majority of community members.
• For individuals who are actively contributing to Mahara or want to contribute code, translate Mahara and need their own instance, etc.

If you work with a company that offers hosting and other Mahara related services, please check with them about the subscription. Some are becoming official partners, allowing them to resell Mahara subscriptions. That makes it easier for their clients to sign up without the need to engage with an additional company.

Portfolios in use

There are now 28 episodes in our podcast 'Create. Share. Engage.' that feature a total of 34 academics and practitioners who have worked with portfolios and are keen to further the idea of documenting and reflection on learning. Lots of tips have been shared for both portfolio authors and those the support learners in creating portfolios. We've also heard of personal stories and pathways to portfolios.

Have you already subscribed to the podcast in your podcast player? New episodes are released every other Wednesday, New Zealand time. The latest episode, published last week, is with Ricardo Elizalde, a Digital Learning Partner at San Francisco Unified School District.

The statistics below show where people are listening in. Europe leads with 51% of listeners, followed by Oceania with 21% (Hurray for Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and the Islands), North America with 18%, Asia with 4%, Africa with 3%, and South America with 1%, with a remaining 2% unallocated. Altogether, we reached 74 countries and 497 towns. If you'd like to share your portfolio story beyond your organisation's boundaries, please get in touch.

Upcoming events

Eportfolio Forum, 11-12 October 2023

This year's Eportfolio Forum takes place in Darwin on Larrakia Land in Australia and online. The Forum's theme is 'Emerging, Connecting, Sustaining', and researchers as well as practitioners from across Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and further afield will share their latest research and facilitate workshops. View the programme for this event and register.

AI webinar series

The webinar series on artificial intelligence and its implications for portfolios continues in December. This webinar series is organised by AAEEBL, Eportfolio Ireland, and ePortfolios Australia. Follow AAEEBL on Humanitix to be notified when a new webinar is announced.

You can watch recordings of past webinars from this series on YouTube.

Past events

AAEEBL Annual Meeting, 13-21 July 2023

'ePortfolio Learning in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Fostering Authentic Assessment Through Inclusive Pedagogies and Design Justice' was the theme of the AAEEBL Annual Meeting that took place in two parts in July: one online and one in-person in Vancouver, Canada.

The recordings of the online sessions as well as the keynote and panel conversation are online. You can access the recordings via the session descriptions that often also have additional resources.

Publication opportunity

The Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability is organising a special issue on the topic of 'The graduate employability practitioner: What works to develop career, teaching capability and organisational capacity?' Portfolios can play an important role for employability and thus if you are conducting research in this area or would like to share your practice, check out the call for submissions.

Mahara in development

SmartEvidence enhancements and retrieval of deleted content in 'Text' or 'Note' blocks

In the last newsletter a couple of new features were introduced, but the information hadn't yet made it into a forum post. Short videos are now available that showcase the basic ideas behind these functionalities that will be released in Mahara 24.04. It is possible to backport these features to an older version of Mahara.

• SmartEvidence version 2
• Restore deleted text content

Next new version release

Will there be a new version of Mahara this October, i.e. Mahara 23.10? No. There won't be one. The next new version is planned to be released in April 2024, i.e. Mahara 24.04. The Mahara team made the decision to go to an annual release cycle as part of our sustainability review and efforts by the team. There are a number of large projects that need to be tackled, which are difficult to fit into a half-year release cycle as each release is a huge effort when it comes to testing that we wouldn't have valuable time available to work on our bigger projects. These projects are necessary for a smooth running of Mahara and keeping up with third-party code, including:

• Upgrade to Elasticsearch 8
• More support for LTI 1.3 Advantage, in particular for organisations using the Moodle plugin for the Mahara assignment submission
• Upgrade of Gridstack
• Upgrade of third-party libraries

Besides these infrastructure related changes, we are also developing new features together with organisations that are using Mahara.

2023 is shaping up to be a year filled with lots of events - in-person and online or hybrid - and also changes to Mahara. Read on for more information.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 October 2023. You can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

All news by Kristina Höppner (Catalyst IT, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Future of Mahara

Over the last 2.5 months we have engaged in consultations around the future of Mahara and what that could look like sustainably. Catalyst decided to pause the public release of Mahara 23.04 and public releases of code fixes for existing versions of Mahara. We did not make this decision lightly. For the past 16 years, after the initial funding period of the Mahara project, Catalyst has been the maintainer and primary development contributor to the software, funding a dedicated team to continue the work on Mahara that was started in mid 2006.

During that time, we have explored, implemented, and iterated over a series of business strategies on how to fund an open source project, focussing on offering professional services such as feature development on behalf of our clients, and providing managed services. The Mahara Partner Programme had also undergone changes over the years, and extended security support introduced as premium service for those organisations that couldn't move to a newer version of Mahara quickly. However, these strategies have not resulted in covering the costs of running a dedicated team, which the software requires due to little regular community contributions apart from a wonderful group of dedicated translators.

We would love to establish a more certain roadmap that would allow for changes and additions to Mahara that community members are looking for, for making UX changes, for exploring how artificial intelligence can be introduced to portfolios meaningfully, and much more. However, we can't do that with the current business strategies and thus needed to explore strategies that we had not considered in the past, which would distribute costs more equitably across all organisations using Mahara and not just a small number that wanted to fund bug fixes and features. and the majority of the rest of the work to be born by Catalyst.

In May we invited the community to participate in a first round of consultation sessions to gather feedback on funding models, primarily a variety of subscription models, that we explored. We followed that up with another round of consultations and a series of individual meetings in June after we had narrowed down the funding model. We would like to thank everyone who engaged in this process, provided insight into their use of Mahara, the challenges they face, but also the possibilities of supporting the project that some have been using for more than 10 years through a subscription.

We are very grateful for all the feedback that is still coming in and that we are carefully reviewing, incorporating into our thinking for the final proposal, and responding to. We are in the process of finalising the subscription model and the accompanying documentation for our Catalyst internal business case. Please bear with us a little longer. We will publish the results as soon as possible and still aim to do so in the first half of July.

I'd like to reiterate a few things that had come up as questions over the last month:

• Catalyst continues to offer services around Mahara in all areas, from the start of a project all the way to the support of implementations.
• Mahara continues to be published under the GPL license, meaning that you can customise it and install it on your own servers, etc. We are not switching to a mandatory software as a service offering, but recognise that a large number of organisations in the community prefer to host Mahara on their own infrastructure instead of engaging a third-party service provider for that.
• You can continue to host Mahara on your own or select your preferred support company. The subscription pricing takes that into consideration.
• If you wish to move quickly to Mahara 23.04 or receive the latest security updates and can't wait until the full subscription pricing and contracts are in place, please get in touch. We have an interim option available for those organisations.

We will be publishing an update to the selected subscription model once the offer has been finalised in the forum thread on this topic. Those that have expressed interest in gaining access to Mahara 23.04 will also receive a direct notification.

Portfolios in use

When I started the podcast 'Create. Share. Engage.' last September, I was very excited to be talking to portfolio practitioners around the world who conduct research in the field, support faculty and students, and simply do awesome things with portfolios at their organisations. I am honoured that they all allow me to share their stories and thus share them with all of you.

Because portfolio practice goes beyond the tool, I do not limit my conversations to portfolio community members who use Mahara. We can all learn from each other, no matter our preferred software. I invite you to listen to these different stories as they all have their unique viewpoints, yet also show a considerable overlap, e.g. on the importance of feedback, the portfolio being a learner's and not an institution's domain, and the lifelong learning aspect.

Each episode comes with resources, chapter markers for quickly jumping between sections of the interview, a full transcript, and a series of visuals that I share on social media, e.g. our Mastodon account. and via posts on LinkedIn.

You can listen to 'Create. Share. Engage.' in your favourite podcast app or on the podcast's website. If you podcast app allows you to leave a review, please do so. You can also email me with your feedback or get in touch if you'd like to appear in an episode yourself.

The currently latest episode is with Dr Bob Reuter from University of Luxembourg where my Mahara journey started in 2008.

Upcoming events

AAEEBL Annual Meeting 2023, 13-14 and 19-21 July 2023

This year's AAEEBL Annual Meeting has the theme of 'ePortfolio Learning in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Fostering Authentic Assessment Through Inclusive Pedagogies and Design Justice'. The event will take place in two parts:

• Online: 13-14 July 2023
• In-person in Vancouver, BC, Canada: 19-21 July 2023, starting with the pre-conference workshop day on 19 July and ending on 21 July midday. The in-person sessions will not have online components

View the schedule and then register for the event. There are several options, including free tickets for students and a bulk order option for organisations that want to send several staff members.

Webinar 'How to get started with AI tools for portfolios', 10 August 2023

With new artificial intelligence (AI) tools, assistants, chatbots, and system integrations launching every day, it can be challenging to figure out where to start. What AI tools can a portfolio practitioner try out or create themselves easily? Where can a learning designer find inspiration? How do you set up a chatbot within the promised 5 minutes? Should you give any of this a go yourself?

Join us for a practical online workshop led by Dr Megan Mize (Old Dominion University), where she will share her firsthand experiences of experimenting with AI technology in her classes in recent months. Megan will present tools that she’s used, including ones she has personally created without any programming knowledge. During this hands-on session, you'll interact with one of these tools and even set up your own chatbot!

Together, we will explore the intersection of AI and portfolio-based education, uncovering new possibilities, and navigating the ethical considerations of AI in teaching and learning.

• When: 10 August 2023, 10am AEST
• Where: Online
• Registration: Published in the next few days via ePortfolios Australia and then also on AAEEBL Events.

Eportfolio Forum 2023, 11-12 October 2023

The Australian Eportfolio Forum will take place in dual delivery mode again this year with in-person sessions at Charles Darwin University and online. The theme is 'Engaging, Connecting, Sustaining'. While the call for proposals is closed now, you can register for the event.

Past events

Webinar 'Global perspectives on artificial intelligence and portfolios', 22 June 2023

The first webinar in the series 'Artificial intelligence and portfolios', a partnership between AAEEBL, ePortfolios Australia, and Eportfolio Ireland, took place on 22 June 2023, and was a panel conversation with Associate Professor Christine Slade (University of Queensland), Associate Professor Leanne Ngo (La Trobe University), and Dr Kevin Kelly (San Francisco State University) in which they explored global perspectives on artificial intelligence and portfolios. This webinar served as a starting point for our community webinars that will follow over the next few months in which we will explore the topic of AI more closely and learn together.

If you'd like to facilitate a session, share research, experiments, or ideas, please get in touch with one of the partnering organisations.

Webinar 'ePortfolios: Promises, problems, and self-regulated learning', 5 May 2023

GRAILE hosted the panel 'ePortfolios: Promises, problems, and self-regulated learning' with Prof Gavin TL Brown, Associate Professor Chris Deneen, Dr Forence Gabriel, and moderator Associate Professor Negin Mirriahi in which portfolios were looked at in particular from the angle of assessment and self-regulated learning.

Mahara in development

Outcomes portfolio and submission of portfolios

Mahara 23.04 introduced two new big changes: The introduction of outcomes portfolios, a new way to track outcomes and individual achievements towards these outcomes in a portfolio, and how portfolios are submitted in Mahara. Watch the short feature video for a quick overview of the highlights in Mahara 23.04 or watch the longer walk through of the outcomes portfolio functionality for an in-depth view of this exciting new way to scaffold the collection and reflection on learning experiences when more guidance for learners is needed.

SmartEvidence enhancements and introduction of a recycle bin

AP Hogeschool Antwerpen is funding enhancements to SmartEvidence to allow more than one assessor to assess a portfolio, along with students also being able to provide a self-assessment. The idea of being able to use a rubric with SmartEvidence and mapping artefacts to competencies has been explored during the design phase of this project as well. I will be publishing details about these soon. If you are interested in sponsoring enhancements to SmartEvidence, please get in touch with me.

With clients here in New Zealand, we have been discussing how we can introduce a recycle bin for those times when learners delete content that they did want to keep. I will post about these ideas shortly as well to share the design ideas more widely.

I'll post about these ideas in the forum 'Comments on feature proposals' in the coming days.

Happy new year! The Mahara team at Catalyst IT wishes you all the best for 2023. We look forward to engaging with you around all things Mahara this year again to further portfolio practice around the world.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 April 2023. You can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Congratulations

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst IT, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The Mahara project had an advent calendar to count down to the Christmas holidays. This year, community members could win prizes. We'd like to congratulate all winners:

• Mahara stickers: Dajan, Stéphane, and Rita
• Consultations with either Sam Taylor or me: Jane, Moritz, Romy
• Bronze support package: Jeroen

Mahara in use

Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) takes another journey with Mahara

Ali Hastie (SRUC, United Kingdom)

Leading on from the successful projects with the use of Mahara, such as the Forestry’s Practical Contract Management and the Equine Graded Unit project, SRUC is making a major push on the journey with the use of Mahara as an ePortfolio platform for new and existing qualifications.

The Scottish Qualification Authority (SQA) released its Next Generation Higher Qualifications last year and has been a real driver in directing SRUC academic staff towards using an ePortfolio system such as Mahara with their students.

SRUC’s Digital Learning Team, under the Centre for the Enhancement in Learning and Teaching (CELT), has supported the ‘SQA Next Gen’ initiative by:

• Collaborating with the students who provided the voiceover for the animated introduction bite-sized video on the features available within Mahara.
• Providing staff development opportunities to academic staff in using Mahara with their students, which has resulted in certain cases staff using journals for their own continuing professional development and teaching staff looking at other curriculum areas in which Mahara can be used by their students.
• Guiding the teaching teams in creating template Mahara pages with clear instructions for the students within accordance to SQA assessment criteria, which have been shared at other SRUC campuses.
• Developed an online support area within Mahara for students, which contain collections of pages with bite-sized video and downloadable document guidance on using Mahara, FAQs on Mahara, and previous student examples of Mahara ePortfolios.
• Developed an online support area within Moodle for staff, which also contains bites-sized videos on using Mahara and further guidance on ePortfolios for digital assessments.

From now until the end of the 2022-23 academic year (and beyond), it will be exciting to see what digital evidence the students produce within their Mahara digital portfolios. However, one thing for sure is that certain teaching staff within SRUC have turned a corner with the use of Mahara as an ePortfolio with positive results.

Seven episodes of the podcast 'Create. Share. Engage.'

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst IT, Aotearoa New Zealand)

At the end of September 2022, the first episode of our latest Mahara project, the podcast 'Create. Share. Engage.' went live with an interview with Lisa Donaldson. Since then, six more episodes have become available in the bi-weekly rhythm. The latest episode comes directly from Aotearoa New Zealand with Mandia Mentis and Wendy Holley-Boen who have been championing portfolios at Massey University for many years an introduce portfolios to future teachers.

In each episode, you can listen to one or more portfolio practitioners who share their personal journey and also how they support students at their institutions. You can listen to 'Create. Share. Engage.' in your favourite podcast app and receive new episodes automatically, or you can listen on the podcast website.

Each episode comes with resources mentioned in the interview in the show notes, and you find a transcript of each conversation on the episode page along with chapter markers for easy access to different parts of the interview.

In January, the journey around the world continues with a stop in the Netherlands, visiting Bas Bakker (4 January 2023), returning to Aotearoa New Zealand for a bonus episode in which I interview a colleague of mine, Maia Miller, on web accessibility (11 January 2023), and then virtually head across the Tasman to visit Ingrid D'Souza to talk about creativity in portfolios and lifelong portfolio practice (18 January 2023).

Do you want to share your own portfolio journey? Email me.

Portfolio show and tell at UCL

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst IT, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Recently, Cathy Elliott, Vice Dean Education in Social and Historical Sciences at UCL in London, shared her experience of using Mahara with her students in a recording for a UCL event. In it, she showcases student portfolios and walks viewers through some of the portfolio activities, which she scaffolded through prompts and templates. She shares her assessment criteria, demonstrating how she incorporates portfolios into the wider class assessment schedule.

Events

Upcoming: Mahara Open Forum (7-8 January 2023)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand) and organisers of Mahara Open Forum

The Japanese Mahara User Group is organising the 12th Mahara Open Forum (MOF) as an early gift in 2023.

Past: #Hui22 (26 November 2022)

H.D. Hirth (Medienzentrum Kassel, Germany)

Lpaso - Institute for learning culture (Institut für Lernkultur e.V.) organised the 10th hui on 26 November 2022. After the biggest challenges of the pandemic were overcome, everybody looked forward to meeting in person again this year. Besides mahara@hui, maker@hui was a big topic of the event. The event was held at the new location of the media centre of the city of Kassel in Germany, which had moved to the Astrid Lindgren School.

Uwe Lübbermann, a successful entrepreneur and founder, amongst others known for Premium Cola in Germany, could be won for the keynote at #Hui22, which was titled 'Hack the economy: From a normal entrepreneur who does almost everything differently'. The marked difference for his company is that it is led collaboratively. From general decisions impacting the wider company to determining employee salaries to supplier and client relationships, Uwe Lübbermann discussed how he envisaged the collaboratively led company structure. That insight sparked lots of ideas for hacking education, which resulted in a lively debate about a new 'operating system' for education.

The event format of #Hui22 was the 'lean café', which allows for planned sessions, like the keynote, sessions offered on the day, and lots of room for conversations and discussions. This allowed participants to explore new devices and media available at the media centre and discuss how they could be used in the classroom. Amongst the popular devices were 3D printers, laser cutters, virtual reality glasses, and a CNC (Computerised Numerical Control) machine that produce parts based on a pre-programmed sequence of commands. Participants could also learn JavaScript programming basics.

Altogether, it was a day of intense exploration and learning for all educators who now take the inspiration and ideas back to their own schools to experiment with them further.

Mahara in development

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The release of Mahara 23.04 is only a few months away in the second half of April 2023. We will include a major new feature to support the scaffolding of the creation of portfolios: Outcomes based portfolios. Take a look at what this will entail. Please note that the feature is still in development, and thus the walk through shows wireframes for certain parts.

This new feature will allow you to work collaboratively on portfolios in groups and track the progress of students in three different ways:

• Overall outcomes
• Page-level activities (the 'Sign-off' feature already in Mahara)
• Checkpoints defined as part of activities

Kia ora. We are getting closer to the release of Mahara22.10 and look forward to sharing some new features and other improvements with you.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 January 2023. You can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Mahara in use

Podcast 'Create. Share. Engage.'

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst IT, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Portfolio practice is a lot about story telling and reflecting on one's own learning. In this newsletter, we regularly share portfolio implementation stories from organisations around the world. I wanted to do that on a more regular basis while at the same time learn about podcasting. So why not combine the two?

Over the last two to three years, podcasts have gained in popularity and are a great way to stay in touch with a community and provide educational content. I started listening to podcasts when my bike commute increased from about eight minutes to 23 minutes one way (on a not too windy Wellington day) in the second half of 2019. I found it a wonderful medium to learn something new, listen to my favourite topics but not sit in front of a screen or book. That's when I also realised that I enjoyed hearing people's stories told by themselves because there is much richer information shared than in an interview or article you'd read. The audio medium allows for more emotion and incidental stories.

While we've been sharing stories in the community here in the newsletter and at events, I wanted to make this a more regular feature and thus started a podcast in September of this year. Lisa Donaldson was my very first brave guest to give this all a go. In her episode, Lisa talks about the portfolio initiative at Dublin City University and how it grew from 0 to 6,000 in six weeks. You can listen to 'Create. Share. Engage.' on the podcast website or in your favourite podcast app. It is available on all major platforms.

Every two weeks on Wednesdays, you'll hear from our portfolio community members. These are my guests until the end of the year:

• Dr Orna Farrell on 12 October 2022
• Dr Misty Kirby on 26 October 2022
• Teresa MacKinnon on 9 November 2022
• Sam Taylor on 23 November 2022
• Christine Dülfer on 7 December 2022
• Dr Mandia Mentis and Dr Wendy Holley-Boen on 21 December 2022

If you would like to share your own portfolio journey or have feedback, please send me an email.

Mahara at the University of Zaragoza (Spain)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst IT, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Alfredo Berbegal Vázquez and his colleagues Ana Arraiz Pérez and Fernando Sabirón Sierra from the University of Zaragoza in Spain and Abel Merino Orozco (University of Burgos, Spain) published their article 'The e-portfolio in higher education: The case of a line of teaching innovation and complex change management' in Tuning Journal for Higher Education last November. It details a longitudinal study on the portfolio implementation at the University of Zaragoza.

Join the conversation around the findings in the forum.

A new portfolio newsletter

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst IT, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Since April 2011 I've been editing this quarterly Mahara community newsletter, this being the 47th issue. I started the newsletter share stories, events, and information about the Mahara software in a format that was quick to read and follow up. Sometimes it feels though that there is much more to share that goes beyond Mahara. You may have seen me sharing events from the wider portfolio communities I'm involved in, in particular AAEEBL and ePortfolios Australia.

If you'd like to receive more frequent portfolio news, you can sign up for our new Catalyst newsletter on Mahara and all things portfolio that I'll publish every first Wednesday of the month, starting on 5 October 2022. The quarterly community newsletter will continue, and I'd love for you to share your insights.

Upcoming events

Eportfolio Forum 2022 (26-27 October 2022)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The 11th Eportfolio Forum (Eportforum) will be held at the University of Melbourne, Australia [Kulin Nation] and online on 26 and 27 October 2022. This event is for new and experienced educators, learning designers, and researchers interested in ePortfolios. There is a wide variety of sessions planned:

• 20x20 presentation, aka Pecha Kucha
• Digital interactive poster
• Intensive workshop
• In-depth workshop
• Professional conversation
• Peer reviewed paper

Join the event in person in Melbourne or online to learn and share your experience.

Digital Ethics Task Force October webinar on accessibility (25 October 2022)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force offers a free 2-hour webinar on accessibility in portfolio practice on 25 October 2022. This workshop is offered in partnership with Eportfolio Ireland and will provide you with practical ways to center accessibility in ePortfolio assignments and support students in the creation of accessible ePortfolios. Dr Kevin Kelly (San Francisco State University) and Dr Peter McLellan (Oxford College of Emory University) will be the workshop facilitators.

Register for this accessibility webinar to secure your spot.

Webinar: Introduction to Mahara (3 dates between 1 and 3 November 2022)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

If you are reading this newsletter, you are most likely already well versed in the use of Mahara and portfolio practice in general. If you have colleagues whom you'd like to bring on board with portfolios, you may consider letting them know about this free introduction webinar that I am offering three times to account for different time zones:

Webinar: New features in Mahara 22.10 (3 dates between 1 and 2 November 2022)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

With Mahara 22.10 being released in the second half of October, I'd like to take you on a tour of highlighted changes in this release and also give you an outlook for Mahara 23.04 to be released next April. Spoiler alert: There'll be some great new changes trialling new workflows for competency or skills based portfolios. So don't miss it. Register for one of the three free sessions (session times link to time zone converter):

92nd Mahara developer meeting (8 November 2022)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The 92nd Mahara developer meeting will take place on 8 November 2022, 23:00 UTC. While the focus is on the technical side of Mahara, everybody is welcome to attend this meeting and share in the discussion.

The recording and minutes of previous meetings are accessible on our wiki.

Past events

AAEEBL Annual Meeting 2022

The 2022 Annual Meeting for the Association for Authentic Experiential Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) took place online on 21 and 22 July 2022 and featured a wide range of presentations and workshops. Portfolio veterans, e.g. Kathleen Blake Yancey, Helen Chen, Terry Rhodes, and Kevin Kelly presented and workshoped alongside session facilitators from several countries over the two days to share their knowledge, discuss new and exciting ideas in the area of portfolio practice, and learn from each other.

The AAEEBL Annual Meeting recordings are now available. You can find resources shared in the individual sessions and a transcript for each recording (along side the closed captions on the videos) in the session descriptions on the conference website.

AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force workshops

In August, the Digital Ethics Task Force facilitated two workshops on sustainable portfolio practice, asking questions around the visibility of the labour that goes into creating portfolio programmes and then portfolio tasks to also tackle the labour that portfolio creators undertake. You can watch the recording of one of the workshops already in the YouTube playlist where you can find all other recordings of workshops that Task Force members facilitated.

Mahara in development

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

It is October and thus Mahara release month. The Mahara team at Catalyst will make a preview version available shortly, giving you the chance to check out the new features before the final release in the second half of October. We invite you to install the preview version on your test or development server. If you don't have access to a non-production site, you will be able to use one of our development sites.

Mahara 22.10 will have usability improvements for a number of features, Bootstrap 5, and use Font Awesome 6 icons. A lot of work has gone into progressing the compatibility with PHP 8.1. While we do not yet recommend to use Mahara 22.10 with PHP 8.1 in production, we do encourage everyone who wants to upgrade to give it a thorough test on a development server and provide feedback. We will announce the preview and final versions in the news forum to which you can subscribe.

If you want to learn about the new features in Mahara 22.10 and also get a glimpse into some of the exciting changes coming in Mahara 23.04, attend one of our free webinars at the start of November.

Kia ora. It is the middle of 2022 already, and we have some celebrations to share as well as upcoming portfolio events that will be held online.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 October 2022. You can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Congratulations

Lisa Donaldson: Teaching Support Award at Dublin City University

Mark Glynn (Dublin City University, Ireland) and Kristina Hoeppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

At Dublin City University (DCU), the Teaching Support Award, which recognises those who make an outstanding contribution to the support of teaching without being ‘frontline’ teaching staff, was awarded to Lisa Donaldson of the Teaching Enhancement Unit (TEU) in May 2022.

Staff have praised Lisa, giving reasons why Lisa was a well-deserving recipient of this year's award:

"Lisa has been involved in the roll out of Eportfolios to many thousands of students and to large amounts of staff. Her patience and good humour is legendary and she dismisses worries about silly questions with 'the only silly question is an unasked question.'"

"She is the absolute definition of teaching excellence. Having made the Senior Fellowship journey with her, she has guided me in the creation of an Eportfolio, all with patience, professionalism and best pedagogical practice."

"I cannot praise Lisa enough for her enthusiasm in promoting the use of e-portfolios in DCU, and the invaluable training and supports she provided when I introduced Loop Reflect to my class last year. Lisa also promotes DCU externally through her collaborative (and democratic) 'unconference', her e-book on e-portfolios, and other fora. Her positivity,  knowledge of her subject, and unstinting support for classroom innovation, is motivating."

Lisa was instrumental in the implementation of Loop Reflect, DCU's Mahara instance, in 2016 and has since then supported students and staff. Together with her colleagues at the TEU, Lisa started the student 'etern' (electronic intern) programme, empowering students to be ePortfolio mentors for other students and staff. Loop Reflect and the eterns are not integral parts of DCU's ePortfolio strategy that does not depend on a single person, but is supported by students, staff, the TEU, and the wider university administration.

Lisa is also a well-respected member of the wider ePortfolio community. She was a founding member of the community of practice EPortfolio Ireland and is a current Board Member of the Association of Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) amongst others. Many of us in the ePortfolio community have benefitted from conversations with Lisa, and are familiar with her writing as well as edited eBooks that gather practice from around the community.

Photo by Kyran O'Brien depicts Lisa Donaldson and DCU President Prof Daire Keogh; used with permission

Dominique-Alain Jan: Contributor in two new French portfolio publications discussing Mahara

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Recently, two books discussing ePortfolio practices were published in French. Our very own Dominique-Alain Jan, French translator, Mahara Hui France organiser, and French community facilitator, contributed to both of them:

• Pratiques et innovations à l'ère du numérique en formation à distance
• 23 progressions pédagogiques pour réussir avec l’ePortfolio Mahara

Mahara.org: New look

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

On 1 January 2017 we went live with our then new logo that by now is familiar to everyone. Our wonderful graphic and brand designer Evonne Cheung also created a new theme for our community website. Since this was a little while ago now, she got creative again and came up with a new theme for that site and also established new social media templates. This new design is an evolution of our brand for Mahara and also brings in a little local flavour from Aotearoa New Zealand. This theme demonstrates the possibilities you have design wise especially on the homepage. Mahara can be branded to reflect your organisation's identity and thus make it more of your own.

Upcoming events

Moodlemoot Mahara Hui France (6-8 July 2022)

Dominique-Alain Jan (Switzerland) and Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

It's become a tradition for the French Mahara community to combine Mahara Hui with Moodlemoot. This tradition continues at this year's gathering in Caen in Normandy. A number of Mahara sessions are planned:

6 July 2022

• Keynote by Dominique-Alain Jan
• Laure Benhamou and Damien Le Roux will present how they blended a course (including ePortfolio) in chemistry teaching
• Calara Aoun-Jan and Sébastien Payre will deliver a session on how to move from a 'classic' form of teaching to competence-based teaching with ePortoflio

7 July 2022

• Alexi Kaufman will talk about the 'commons' and the access to school, speaking about open source, open education, and open ePortfolios
• Magali Marzo will present how moving back and forth from Mahara to Moodle helps learners to make their knowledge 'grow'

8 July 2022

• Workshop on how to engage with ePortfolios with Mahara
• Dominique-Alain Jan will deliver a presentation on how he has developed a course with my students as co-writers on Moodle with open sourced tools such as Compendium Learning Design, Learning Designer, Moodle, and Mahara

90th Mahara developer meeting (12 July 2022)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The 90th Mahara developer meeting will take place on 12 July 2022, 22:00 UTC. While the focus is on the technical side of Mahara, everybody is welcome to attend this meeting and share in the discussion.

The recording and minutes of previous meetings are accessible on our wiki.

AAEEBL Annual Meeting (changed dates: 21-22 July 2022)

Join the 2022 Annual Meeting for the Association for Authentic Experiential Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) on July 21-22 with activities ranging from 8:00am to 6:00pm U.S. Pacific Time. Now in its third year as a virtual convening, this conference has been intentionally designed to accommodate participation across time zones. Meeting highlights include:

• The 2022 Batson Lecture with Kathleen Blake Yancey, Professor Emerita, Florida State University speaking on 'Tracing Learning in ePortfolios: Where We Have Been; Where We Might Go'
• Engagement with the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force
• Interactive workshops: 'Building YOUR Professional ePortfolio', 'Designing Equitable ePortfolio Assignments', 'ePortfolio Scoring Guides', and 'How to Get Started with Digital Ethics'
• Panel of students speaking about their experiences with ePortfolios
• Ignite Talks
• AAEEBL Shark Tank (with a twist!)

The organisers welcome those who are new to ePortfolios to experienced practitioners and researchers who are interested in exploring the pedagogical and technical considerations surrounding the design and implementation of ePortfolios for assessment and evaluation, equity and social justice. 

Please visit the AAEEBL Annual Meeting page for more information. If you have questions, please get in touch with the AAEEBL Annual Meeting organisers

Digital ethics: Sustainable ePortfolio Practice (8 and 25 August 2022)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The AAEEBL Task Force on Digital Ethics in ePortfolios is offering a series of free online workshops this year, exploring topics of digital ethics and how they relate to the practice and research of ePortfolios. The next workshop will be on 'Sustainable ePortfolio Practice – Considering Creation, Support, and Advocacy'. There will be two dates for that to cater to different time zones:

• 8 August 2022, 20:00 EDT (time might change to a little earlier)
• 25 August 2022, 9:30 AEST

Eportfolio Forum 2022 (26-27 October 2022)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The 11th Eportfolio Forum (Eportforum) will be held at the University of Melbourne, Australia [Kulin Nation] and online on 26 and 27 October 2022. This event is for new and experienced educators, learning designers, and researchers interested in ePortfolios. There is a wide variety of sessions planned:

• 20x20 presentation, aka Pecha Kucha
• Digital interactive poster
• Intensive workshop
• In-depth workshop
• Professional conversation
• Peer reviewed paper

Join the event in person in Melbourne or online to learn and share your experience.

Mahara and security

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

In the last newsletter I already wrote about security. It deserves reiterating: Subscribe to the Mahara security forum to keep up to date with our security announcements for all supported versions of Mahara. Each version is supported with security and other high importance bug fixes for 18 months from its release. If your Mahara version is not supported any more, you can purchase our extended security support. That will provide you with security patches for your version of Mahara when vulnerabilities also affect that version.

If you learn about security vulnerabilities that may affect Mahara, third-party libraries used in Mahara, or the project infrastructure, please get in touch so we can investigate these. You can find more information about security in Mahara and FAQ on our security page.

Kia ora. Spring has sprung in the Northern hemisphere, and those of us living in the Southern hemisphere are heading into fall. Wherever you are in the world, we have Mahara news for you to celebrate achievements, view what community members are doing, and what is happening with the next release. Read on.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 July 2022. You can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Celebrations

Evonne Cheung: Winner of a New Zealand Open Source Award

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Ngā Tohu Pūmanawa Herekore o Aotearoa - New Zealand Open Source Awards (NZOSA) are a bi-annual celebration of contributions in the world of open source in Aotearoa New Zealand. Due to the pandemic, our awards schedule was shifted, and then the 2021 awards ceremony postponed. Winners could finally be announced at the beginning of February this year. The Mahara project team is stoked that our very own visual designer Evonne Cheung was the winner in the category 'Kaikoha Pūmanawa Herekore - Open Source Contributor'.

Evonne is the longest serving member of the Mahara project team, having started contributing in November 2006. Since then she has worked tirelessly on the Mahara brand, creating and updating the logo over time, creating special logos and lots of other imagery for community groups and events around the world, creating themes, and implementing these on the front-end while also creating custom themes for our Catalyst clients.

Read the full announcement and check out some of Evonne's work that you may not yet have seen.

Doris Tam: Latest approved Mahara developer

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

At the beginning of March this year, Doris Tam became the latest approved developer for the Mahara project. She's been working on Mahara in the Catalyst team since December 2018, first as part-time student, and since 2021 as full-time developer. But her first commits to Mahara trace back to 2015 when she participated in the Catalyst Open Source Academy as a high school student. The Academy is an annual two-week summer holiday programme for high school students in Aotearoa New Zealand where they learn about the various roles in the software development life cycle, step through them creating an app of their own, and in the second week of the programme contribute to an open source project. The Mahara project team has participated several years and students developed new features, contributed bug fixes, and wrote automation tests.

Check out the news article about Doris's appointment to also learn more about the important role of an approved developer.

DCU Annual Eportfolio Student Showcase & Awards

Lisa Donaldson (Dublin City University, Ireland)

Dublin City University stages an annual Eportfolio Student Showcase & Awards to celebrate and share the excellent ePortfolios produced by students for assessment, work placement, and/or extra curricular activities. A panel of judges, comprising of members of the Teaching Enhancement Unit and students reviewed applications based on the following criteria:

• Effective showcase of knowledge / skills / attributes through relevant argument and artefacts
• Level of reflection
• Design and originality

This year, ten students were shortlisted, and a taste of their creativity can be seen in this video.

Congratulations to the worthy winners of 2022!

Portfolios in use

Mahara at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka

Harith Wickramasekara (University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka)

The University of Kelaniya introduced Mahara a little over a year ago, and the Faculty of Medicine is the first to use it. Medical students have the Professional Development and Family Medicine Strand, where they maintain a portfolio over four years. With the introduction of Mahara, portfolios changed drastically from paper-based to ePortfolios. It has been integrated into our Moodle platform so students can submit their portfolios directly to Moodle. Students have positive feedback on Mahara since it is user-friendly, time-saving, and digital. The staff development course is another place where the Mahara ePortfolio is used to create and maintain portfolios for probationary lecturers following the course.

Getting our digital portfolios up and running has paid off: other departments in the Faculty of Medicine, such as Medicine, Community Medicine, and Psychiatry are interested in introducing Mahara to their disciplines to maintain their portfolios.

Mahara shortlisted in HundrED's assessment solutions spotlight

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Mahara has been shortlisted by HundrED as education innovation in its assessment solution spotlight. HundrED is a not-for-profit organisation that gathers information on a shares innovations in formal education, kindergarten through high school. Mahara was created to give learners the chance to collect important evidence of their learning journey in a space that they control and where they decide who can access their evidence and reflections.

Don Christie, Managing Director at Catalyst, states it well on the Mahara HundrED page: "Mahara allows students to manage how the world sees them, and their own destiny, moving away from institutional ownership and having more control at a personal level."

Find out more about all shortlisted projects on the HundrED website.

Upcoming events

Panel: Equity and inclusion in flexible learning (5 April 2022)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Over the last two years, the education sector around the world has had to deal with a lot of changes due to the pandemic. FLANZ, the Flexible Learning Association of New Zealand, explored the topic of equity and inclusion in a panel conversation focusing on the experience in Aotearoa New Zealand with Albany Senior High School Principal Claire Amos, Director of the Centre for Academic Development at Victoria University of Wellington Stephen Marshall, and Head of the eLearning Group at The University of Auckland Steve Leichtweis last November in a webinar, moderated by Kwong Nui Kim from AUT.

The four will be back for part 2 on 5 April 2022, 2-3pm NZST as there were many topics still left untouched. Come along to this free webinar to learn about challenges and successes in Aotearoa in secondary and tertiary education. While this panel does not have an ePortfolio focus, I wanted to share it with you as ePortfolios are part of flexible learning practices.

Register to access the webinar.

Digital ethics: ePortfolio evaluation practices (11 April 2022)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The AAEEBL Task Force on Digital Ethics in ePortfolios is offering a series of free online workshops this year, exploring topics of digital ethics and how they relate to the practice and research of ePortfolios. The first workshop was held in February, and you are welcome to watch the recording and access the resources.

The next workshop will be held on 11 April 2022, 2-4pm EDT. Join the conversation with Morgan Gresham (University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, U.S.A.) and Theresa Conefrey (Santa Clara University, U.S.A.) and explore the topic of evaluation in ePortfolios through a digital ethics lens. By the end of the workshop, you will be able to…

89th Mahara developer meeting (12 April 2022)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The 89th Mahara developer meeting will take place on 12 April 2022, 11pm UTC. We will talk about the upcoming release of Mahara 22.04 and any other topics that the developers want to discuss. While the focus is on the technical side of Mahara, everybody is welcome to attend this meeting and share in the discussion.

The recording and minutes of previous meetings are accessible on our wiki.

Peralta Online Equity Conference (27-29 April 2022)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The second annual Peralta Online Equity Conference will take place from 27 to 29 April 2022. From the organisers: "We welcome equity-minded students, educators, staff and leaders who represent colleges, universities, non-profit organizations and vendors from all around the world. Our goals are 1) to increase the visibility of all efforts to increase learning equity in higher education and 2) to bring together institutions that want to share and adopt equitable practices for all online students globally."

Register for free for this conference and learn how you can participate.

AAEEBL Annual Meeting (14-15 and 21-22 July 2022)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

This year's AAEEBL Annual Meeting has the theme of 'A changed world for ePortfolios: Opportunities for design justice, effective implementation, and assessment'. The conference will focus particular emphasis on three areas:

Mahara in development

Similarity checking of portfolios in Moodle

Lisa Donaldson (Dublin City University, Ireland)

Dublin City University (DCU) is delighted to share news of a significant development to strengthen the capabilities of Mahara in supporting academic integrity. Ouriginal, formally known as Urkund, is a text matching software used to detect and help prevent plagiarism. It is used by hundreds of educational institutions and corporates across the globe, and it was recently acquired by Turnitin.

At DCU as part of our virtual learning environment (VLE) we use a suite of tools including Moodle, Mahara, Unicam, and Ouriginal. Whilst more often than not, ePortfolio based assessment focuses on reflective writing, with the rise in popularity of ePortfolio to support diverse forms of assessment, there was recently a request from staff to be able to submit ePortfolio content through Ouriginal. While all assessments submitted to Moodle are automatically passed to our text matching software, this functionality did not stretch to ePortfolio based assessments. To address this, in partnership with Catalyst UK and Catalyst IT, DCU funded development to enhance the existing Mahoodle (integration between Mahara and Moodle) functionality.

Following this development, any Mahara ePortfolio submission from students made via Moodle are automatically sent for text matching to Ouriginal, and the similarity report is passed back to Moodle. The changes to Mahara will be available in Mahara 22.04. Changes to the Ouriginal Moodle plugin will be announced when they are publicly available. This functionality works in conjunction with the Mahara assignment submission plugin (web services edition) and utilises LTI for authentication purposes.

Mahara 22.04

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

It is April, and that means that it is release month for the new version of Mahara. The Mahara team at Catalyst is putting the finishing touches onto the latest version. We will make the preview version available soon. Make sure to keep an eye out for it in the Mahara news forum. The preview version announcement will also include times for free webinars that you can join to learn about the new features.

Mahara 22.04.0 is set to be released in the last week of April. There will be a number of new functionalities available. The developers are also working on getting Mahara ready to move to PHP 8. You can review our plan for moving to PHP 8. If you'd like to support the efforts in getting the code base ready for this new version of PHP - or for any other projects you'd like to tackle - please get in touch so we can share the areas that still need work.

With the release of Mahara 22.04, Mahara 20.10 will not be supported with security updates any more. One final minor point update will be made for this version along with the release of Mahara 22.04. If you wish to stay longer on that version or selected older versions of Mahara yet wish to receive future security updates that are relevant, you can purchase extended security support.

Mahara and security

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Over the last few months, a number of high profile security vulnerabilities were made public that required swift action by teams around the world to keep applications as well as infrastructure secure. When we learn about vulnerabilities, we assess them for Mahara. That includes the code base for Mahara as well as third-party applications. If we need to make changes to Mahara, minor point updates are released as quickly as possible to mitigate any fallout. The Mahara team at Catalyst is well supported by the Catalyst security team and the Catalyst systems operations team to identify risks and discuss mitigation strategies.

Discuss with your local security and infrastructure team or your hosting provider what their strategies are to keep your Mahara site and the infrastructure on which it is housed secure and up to date. If you don't know what version of Mahara you have, log into your Mahara site as site administrator and got to 'Administration menu → Admin home → Overview'. You will see the current version of Mahara in the 'Site information' box. Please note that this information is only accurate if you have cron running.

Subscribe to the Mahara security forum to be kept up to date with our security announcements. If you learn about security vulnerabilities that may affect Mahara, third-party libraries used in Mahara, or the project infrastructure, please get in touch so we can investigate these. You can find more information about security in Mahara and FAQ on our security page.

Kia ora. The Mahara team at Catalyst wishes you a happy new year and all the best for 2022. We look forward to hearing from you and how your use of Mahara is going in 2022. In this first edition of the newsletter in this new year, you'll learn about a number of exciting uses of portfolios. Check them out for all the details.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 April 2022, and you can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Portfolios in use

Exemplars of best practice with eportfolio based assessment

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Dublin City University (DCU) has been using Mahara since 2017 and has become a champion on portfolio based learning since. Lisa Donaldson is instrumental in the implementation of portfolios at DCU and well supported by staff and eterns in the Teaching Enhancement Unit. The latest publication that Lisa edited is the 'Exemplars of best practice with eportfolio based assessment at Dublin City University'. It is an ebook in which ten faculty members share their experience of using Mahara in a wide range of study programmes.

This ebook is a testament to the flexibility and versatility of portfolios and how they can fit into the curriculum.

Special TELJI issue on ePortfolios

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The open access Irish Journal of Technology Enhance Learning published a special issue on ePortfolios. The first five articles were published in July 2021 and the remaining ten now in December 2021. This special issue showcases original research from Irish scholars and international colleagues bringing to the forefront the many ways of using portfolios and also how varied research on portfolios can be.

Congratulations go to the editorial team Orna Farrell, Karen Buckley, Lisa Donaldson, and Tom Farrelly, all from the Eportfolio Ireland community. They not only published this issue giving us valuable research findings, but also making it an explicit goal for this issue to support women scholars who were disproportionally affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. They've reached their goal: 23 of the 28 authors are women.

The articles do not all talk about the use of Mahara, but many authors do work with the platform at their respective institutions. The articles give insight into portfolio practices, how problems are overcome, which questions to tackle next, and how to improve portfolio work.

Digital ethics principles in ePortfolios

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

For the last 2.5 years, AAEEBL (Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning) has had a task force to investigate digital ethics in ePortfolios. In the first two years, the task force mainly worked on establishing a number of principles to guide the ethical use of ePortfolios. These 'Digital ethics principles in ePortfolios' are published online and provide strategies, examples, and resources to support educators, learners, and also platform providers in their work.

Now in the third year, the task force is expanding its scope of work to review the existing principles, conduct more research, and provide resources for the ePortfolio community to work with these principles. On the 'Task Force Scholarship' page, you can find publications as well as references to presentations by the task force members to learn more about the work.

First Mahara advent calendar

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

For the first time there was a Mahara project advent calendar. If you missed one or more days, you can now view all of them. The calendar shares portfolios stories from our Mahara community and the wider ePortfolio world.

Portfolios in upcoming events

Annual Forum on Open Learning and ePortfolios on 24 January 2022

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The Annual Forum on Open Learning and ePortfolios is part of the Annual Meeting of AAC&U. It is an opportunity for ePortfolio researchers and practitioners to share their work and get together virtually again this year. Registration is still open for this one-day event and the entire Annual Meeting.

Mahara Hui FR and Moodle Moot FR

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The French community is planning a gathering mid-year, and we'll share details as soon as they become available.

Mahara in development

Mahara assignment submission plugin for Moodle

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The Mahara assignment submission plugin, web services edition, for Moodle is now available in the Moodle plugins directory. It allows organisations who do not want to rely on MNet to use LTI for authentication purposes. One of the main improvements over the plugin that relies on MNet is the possibility to archive portfolios once they have been graded.

The MNet version of the plugin is still available, but not actively developed by the Catalyst team.

Technology change proposals

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Changes in our technology stack for Mahara are inevitable with changing requirements, work done in third-party libraries, and additional security demands. There are two proposals up for discussion that we'd like to invite you to review and provide us with feedback:

• Mahara shell: Move CLI scripts out of wwwroot and create a class for them.
• Management of third-party libraries: Use Composer and NPM to pull in libraries rather than keeping them in the code base

We'd like to know what you think as especially the management of third-party libraries would impact those most who use Git.

Kia ora. This is the 15th Mahara anniversary edition of the newsletter in which we have a lot to celebrate and also look forward to more portfolio goodness in terms of events and new features. Take a seat or put on your headphones for some of the stories in this newsletter have audio and video resources.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 October 2021, and you can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Congratulations

15 years of Mahara

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Fifteen years ago, a group of portfolio enthusiasts and developers started a project in Aotearoa New Zealand that would spread quickly across the world and find like-minded people who then decided to contribute to the further development of the software. This project was Mahara. Penny Leach, one of the first developers of the software besides Nigel McNie and Martyn Smith, made first first code commit on 27 September 2006, which has become the date to celebrate the anniversary of the Mahara project.

Listen to a number of community members, including Penny, tell a little bit of their Mahara journey.

I'd also like to share a written account from Paul Raper from Switzerland:

At Catalyst, we kicked off the celebrations with a news article. Over the next three weeks, we'll publish a weekly blog post about a different aspect of Mahara. If you are celebrating as well, let us know on social media or via email.

New Zealand Open Source Awards

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The New Zealand Open Source Awards are held every two years and celebrate people, projects, companies, and other organisations who create or make use of open source. This year, we are stoked to announce that Evonne Cheung, Graphic Designer at Catalyst, and the Mahara project itself are finalists in the category 'Open Source Contributor' and 'Open Source Software Project', respectively. We will have to wait patiently until early February 2022 for the final results as the gala dinner needed to be postponed due to our current alert levels in Aotearoa. Keep your fingers crossed.

Mahara in use

Students tell their stories to a global audience

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

In July 2021, the AAEEBL Annual Meeting took place virtually. Being on the organising committee, I had the chance to interview students in the lead-up to the event to find out about their portfolio journeys. This was a wonderful challenge as I had never done audio interviews before and learned about editing audio, adding music, and transcribing the interviews. Six students shared their stories that ranged from Bachelor to PhD candidate as well as from being new to portfolios to supporting other students creating and managing their portfolios.

Three students, Breanna Edebohls (Monash University), Emaan Sami Khan and Ruby Cooney, both from Dublin City University (DCU), are using Mahara to create their digital presence. Samantha Hallows (DCU) sent a video answering a number of interview questions, and that video is also shared. I enjoyed speaking with all of them because all their stories were very unique in how and why they are creating their portfolios and what tips they have to share with other students and educators. Have a listen or read the transcripts. Do you know what your students find most rewarding about their portfolio experience?

Portfolios in upcoming events

Eportfolio Forum, 20-21 October 2021

Allison Miller (ePortfolios Australia, Australia)

2021 Eportfolio Forum (Eportforum) is a two day online event with presentations, workshops, facilitated conversations, and networking on 20-21 October 2021, supported by UNSW Sydney, A variety of interactive sessions will enable new and experienced ePortfolio supporters to gain some 'hands-on' experience with using ePortfolios, including hearing from highly respected keynote presenters.

Registrations for the 10th Eportfolio Forum are now open., and you can view the programme.

Writing workshop for a community crowd-sourced ePortfolio ebook, 21 October 2021

Lisa Donaldson (Dublin City University, Ireland)

This is an announcement made in the AAEEBL community and cross-posted here for a wider spread.

A lot of great ideas around ePortfolio practices were shared at the recent AAEEBL Annual Meeting, and we heard over and over how much you wish we had an open educational resource repository of ePortfolio resources and activities. So, we are planning a writing session to create just that! This will be an opportunity for you to contribute one of your own resources or develop one (a learning activity, assessment activity, or faculty development activity). Our plan is to make this a publication opportunity for you as we develop an ebook from your ePortfolio activities!

Mahara in development

Mahara 21.10

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The Mahara team at Catalyst made the preview version of Mahara 21.10 available for review. This release has a number of small new features and a big one, the start of the implementation of LTI Advantage, which allows for the automatic group creation and enrolment of students and educators from a course in the LMS into a portfolio group. The team is working on the upgrade of Elasticsearch, which is earmarked for Mahara 22.04, along with a range of additional infrastructure upgrades necessary to support PHP 8.

We invite you to install this preview version on your own server infrastructure and upgrade a development or testing site and give it a good test and give us feedback until mid-October so we can consider making changes before the final release of Mahara 21.10 at the end of the month of October 2021. At that time, all currently supported versions of Mahara will receive minor point updates. It will be the last update for Mahara 20.04, which will then not be supported any more with security updates. If you wish to continue using it, you can purchase extended security support.

Mahara Mobile

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Mahara Mobile is currently receiving updates and is already available as beta version in the Android Play Store. You can register as beta tester to get access to that new version that now supports Android 11 and resolves an audio recording issue on phones that do not have an external SD card, but only internal storage.

You can become a beta tester by going to the app in the Play Store and scrolling to the section 'Developer contact'. There you can join the beta test group. We look forward to your feedback.

Changes to the Git branches

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

In August, we proposed changes to our Git branch management to make it easier for organisations that use automation tools to manage their deployments. We started implementing these changes with the 21.10 preview branch and will roll out these changes at the end of October 2021 along with our next software updates and the release of Mahara 21.10. If you have any questions or comments, please add them to the forum topic or come along to our developer meeting on 12 October 2021.

Saving Moodle content directly to Mahara

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

If you use the MNet (Moodle Networking) connection to connect Mahara to Moodle, you may use the 'Export to portfolio' functionality. It is one of the lesser used features of Mahoodle, especially compared the the Mahara assignment submission plugin for Moodle that allows educators to assess portfolios from within a Moodle assignment, having their usual assessment options available.

Moodle HQ is thinking about removing the 'Export to portfolio' functionality from Moodle core and making it available as a plugin. We do not yet have a time line on that change. So if you do rely on that functionality, please watch out for any announcement from Moodle HQ. The plan is to make it available as a plugin to allow those who do use it to continue working it. This change does not affect the Mahara assignment submission plugin, MNet edition, that many use. The Mahara team at Catalyst has put more effort into the web services edition of that plugin that uses LTI as authentication method. That plugin is not yet submitted to the Moodle plugin database, but it is already available for use.

Kia ora. It is almost mid-year, and we've seen a lot of activity in the portfolio world, and there is much more to come. While some of you are looking forward to the summer holidays (or may already be enjoying them), others are in the middle of the academic year working on their portfolios and experimenting with new ideas. In this edition of the Mahara newsletter, we have celebrations, look back at a couple of events, get ready for another two, and take a look at Mahara 21.04, which we released at the end of April 2021.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 October 2021, and you can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Congratulations

Celebrating student excellence

Lisa Donaldson (Dublin City University, Ireland)

On 8 April 2021, the Teaching Enhancement Unit (TEU) at DCU hosted the annual Eportfolio Student Showcase and Awards event.

These annual awards have been an integral event of the ePortfolio initiative in DCU since its launch in 2016. The Showcase is a celebration of student excellence in ePortfolio practice and all students from programmes using the Reflect learning portfolio (based on the Mahara platform) were invited to enter. Students could submit an ePortfolio developed for a module during 2020/2021 or develop one specifically for the Showcase.

The judging panel was impressed this year with the excellent standard of entries from all Faculties and the increased use of rich media to showcase students’ knowledge and skills. The digital skills of students were evident in the use of embedded images and videos, clean navigation, and the degree of creativity and personalisation.

The overall winner was Chelsea Thompson, who developed her ePortfolio as part of the requirements for the Bachelor of Education programme in DCU's Institute of Education. The judges agreed that this was an all-round excellent ePortfolio which surpassed the competition criteria.

Laura Furlong, also from the Institute of Education, Ore Jalaade, DCU Business School, and Lucyann Kehoe, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences were also recognised for their rich and innovative ePortfolios.

Read the full blog post on the NIDL website.

New approved developers

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

At the June 2021 developer meeting, we had two applications of Catalyst staff to become approved developers for the Mahara project. Both, Fergus Whyte and Gold, were confirmed by other developers who could vote. Now they can give a +2 code review, which allows code to be merged into the Mahara core code base. Fergus and Gold demonstrated their knowledge of Mahara by having developed new features, fixed bugs, and also done code reviews, showcasing their understanding of the coding standards in the project.

Anybody in the community can contribute code and review other people's code as part of our quality assurance process. However, only approved developers can give +2 as they exhibit good understanding of the code base and the project. Developers can apply to become approved by other approved developers with a short application that outlines their prior contributions and code reviews, may be asked to answer some questions by other developers during a developer meeting, and then their applications are voted on.

Mahara in use

Internship report as Mahara ePortfolio

Hanna Kubrak and Anne C. Spindler (Hochschule München University of Applied Sciences, Germany)

All business administration students at Hochschule München University of Applied Sciences must complete an 18-week internship during their fourth semester. The students must also submit a report on their internship, describing the employer, the topics and challenges dealt with, and their own growth at the company. Since 2016, students have been creating these internship reports using Mahara.

Among the advantages of Mahara for the students is that it allows creativity and multimedia elements to make lively and interesting reports. From the perspective of the internship supervisor, it is a significant gain to be able to have a direct dialogue with the students through the feedback function. EPortfolios are also resource and space saving since the printed reports do not have to be stored, and neither students nor lecturers have to travel to hand in or collect reports.

The E-Learning Centre supports the implementation with advice and software training.

View an internship report (in German) and an example internship report. The original article appeared in German in a magazine at HM and illustrates that creating an internship report online as portfolio has been successful for the past five years.

Portfolios in upcoming events

AAEEBL Annual Meeting, 20-22 July 2021

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

This year's AAEEBL (Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning) annual meeting will take place online. Join researchers and practitioners from around the world to discuss portfolios under the lens of 'Reimagining the Future of Learning: ePortfolios, Identities, Equity & Belonging'. This year's event will consist of networking, conversations, unconference sessions, a student panel, hackathons / creatathons, and a Shark Tank.

Register today to participate. Students attend for free and have a separate registration form.

Eportfolio Forum, 20-21 October 2021

Allison Miller (ePortfolios Australia, Australia)

2021 Eportfolio Forum (Eportforum) is a two day blended event (face to face and online) of presentations, workshops, facilitated conversations, and networking on 20-21 October 2021 at UNSW Sydney, Kensington campus [Eora nation] and online. This will be the tenth Eportforum.

A variety of interactive sessions will enable new and experienced ePortfolio supporters to gain some ‘hands-on’ experience with using ePortfolios, including hearing from highly respected keynote presenters.

Registrations are now open., and you can view the draft programme.

Mahara in past events

First Mahara Hui Belgium & Netherlands, 22 April 2021

Joost Elshoff (OpenEdu, The Netherlands)

On Thursday, 22 April 2021, the very first Dutch Mahara Hui was organized by Mahara Business Partner OpenEdu. This fully online event was focused on introducing the ePortfolio to teachers and educational technologists in universities and other learning organisations in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Throughout the day, nearly 70 attendees took part in P. Robert-Jan Simons' keynote on motivation for online learning in higher education and five more presentations. Kristina Höppner (Catalyst) introduced the new Mahara 21.04 release to the Dutch speaking audience, and OpenEdu's educational technologist Joost Elshoff introduced Mahara in the broader context of secondary, vocational, and higher education in the Netherlands and Belgium.

After the lunch break, Erik Hendriks, a faculty member of Inholland University of Applied Sciences presented a practical implementation of the portfolio as part of the Bachelor of Business Studies programme to promote entrepreneurship, together with two of his students.

After this presentation, instructional designer Bas Bakker and Joost Elshoff facilitated a hands-on workshop for attendees to create their very first portfolio in Mahara.

In the last presentation of the day, Bas Roggeveen, instructional designer at the Koninklijke Militaire School Luchtmacht, discussed considerations around dossiers for academic performance and portfolios for reflecting on and documenting personal learning experiences, and the platform choices his organisation made.

At the end of Mahara Hui BNL, OpenEdu concluded the event with the launch of a first self-paced course on the use of Mahara and the pedagogy of portfolios, and a Dutch speaking community was established.

Mahara Hui BNL was very well received and OpenEdu aims to organize a new Mahara Hui 2022, for which the exact date and call for proposals will be announced in the months to come.

Mahara gathering at Moodlemoot Euskadi 21, 4 June 2021 (#mooteu21)

Ramón Ovelar (Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Basque Country)

On 4 June 2021, as a part of Moodlemoot Euskadi 21 (Basque Country), participants held a debate around the topic of Mahara and portfolios, with the purpose of sharing best practices with ePortfolios and building a Mahara users' network of organisations in the Basque Country. After a greetings video kindly sent by Kristina Höppner from Catalyst IT, Juan Ezeiza from Axular Lizeoa, Amaia Oleaga from the Faculty of Business Studies of Mondragon Unibertsitatea, Ramón Ovelar, Jesús Romo, and Leire Urcola from the University of the Basque Country, shared their experiences and future development plans. Margari León from i2basque (research and academic network of the Basque Country), another institution using Mahara in Euskadi, also attended the session.

This network of Mahara users in the Basque Country seeks to share expertise and experiences on pedagogical approaches and technical issues related to ePortfolio creation and evaluation. Another goal of the network is to improve the procedure for translating the Basque language pack, maintained by Juan Ezeiza. You can watch the recording of this session (mainly in Basque, with some parts in Spanish).

Mahara in development

Mahara 21.04 released

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

At the end of the April, the Mahara project team at Catalyst released Mahara 21.04 with a lot of new features. Many of these features support organisations rolling out portfolios in large numbers and work with template portfolios. Watch the short new features video for a quick overview of the highlights of this release. There is a longer recording of a webinar. If you are new to Mahara, you can watch a recording of an online introduction.

Welcome to the Mahara April 2021newsletter. It's the first day of the Mahara release month, and we look forward to making new features available to you by the end of the month.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 July 2021, and you can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Awards time

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The bi-annual New Zealand Open Source Awards are open for nominations of open source projects, individuals, and companies in the open source space in Aotearoa New Zealand. Nominations can be made by anybody though before 1 June 2021. The NZOSA are an opportunity for our community to gather and celebrate achievements and recognise the value that open source and its community delivers to Aotearoa New Zealand and the rest of the world. If you'd like to support the Mahara project, why not put in a nomination?

Mahara in use

Student content creation with Mahara and Moodle

Sam Taylor and Jasmin Davies-Hodge (Catalyst, UK)

Dublin City University's second successful 'MoodleMunch' series of webinars came to a close this March with a wonderful 'buffet' of presentations, demonstrations and reflections from the community. Each 'Munch' presentation focuses on how Moodle is used in a way that meets specific areas of the Digital Competence Framework for Educators (DigCompEdu). We thought this was a perfect opportunity to showcase how the mix of Moodle and Mahara could be utilised to meet Area 6 of the framework, 'Facilitating Learners' Digital Competence', where Moodle provides the platform for instruction, context, and assessment, and Mahara is the learners' workbook and collaborative learning space.

You can view the recording of the presentation via DCU's Teaching Enhancement Unit's YouTube channel.

Why do students update their portfolios?

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Motivating students to keep a portfolio can be challenging. What techniques do you use? Do you have annual portfolio awards? Do you use rubrics for portfolio assessments that include presentation criteria? What do you do? I'd love to hear from you and share the ideas in an upcoming newsletter.

Mahara in upcoming events

84th Mahara developer meeting online, 13 April 2021

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Mahara developer meetings are an opportunity to talk with Mahara developers, and for developers to discuss technical questions. Our next Mahara developer meeting will take place on 13 April 2021 at 7:30 UTC. You are welcome to join this online session and participate. If you want to discuss something, please add it to the agenda. Developer meetings are recorded and minuted for a quick perusal of the meeting.

Mahara Hui België en Nederland Online, 22 April 2021

Joost Elshoff (OpenEdu, The Netherlands)

Mahara Business Partner OpenEdu is organising the first Mahara Hui for Belgium and the Netherlands on Thursday, 22 April 2021. During this online conference, educators from various fields (secondary, vocational, and higher education) will present case studies on how Mahara is being implemented and used in their institutions. Prof. Dr. Robert-Jan Simons will open the conference with a keynote on motivation in online and digital education. 

Mahara Hui Belgium & Netherlands 2021 will be a fully online event. All presentations in our program will be in Dutch, except for the Mahara roadmap presentation by Kristina Höppner.

Find out more information and register for the event.

AAEEBL Annual Meeting, 20-22 July 2021

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

AAEEBL (Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning) will hold its annual meeting again virtually like in 2020. The international portfolio community, no matter the platform that organisations favour, will gather to learn, share, and discuss the topic 'Reimagining the Future of Learning: ePortfolios, Identities, Equity & Belonging'. This year's event will consist of networking, conversations, unconference sessions, and a hackathon.

The deadline for submissions is 2 April 2021, so be quick to get your proposal in.

Mahara in past events

Beyond traditional assessment, 18 February 2021

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Eportfolio Ireland hosted an online workshop on 18 February 2021 with the title 'Beyond traditional assessment: A COVID createathon of eportfolio based assessment' that featured Teresa MacKinnon (University of Warwick), long-time Mahara community member and expert on ePortfolio based assessment, and Aurelie Soulier, who employs her knowledge of working with Moodle and Mahara at UCL.

The session was recorded, and you can listen to the advice, ideas, and suggestions that were discussed.

Mahara in development

Mahara 21.04 release

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

It is April, and some of you may wonder why we've been so quiet around new features that you will be able to experience in Mahara 21.04. The Catalyst release team has been involved in an exciting project dealing with recertification portfolios for an organisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. That organisation was also keen to open source the development work. We are in the final stages of finishing up these features to submit them into the Mahara core code base and meet our release goal of making Mahara 21.04, our April 2021 version, available before the end of April.

There will be features that support the creation and dissemination of templates, the approval of portfolios, and reporting around these that we look forward to being able to share with you very soon. Please watch out for an announcement in the 'News' forum later this month when you can preview these features before the official 21.04 release.

We will also offer online sessions introducing these new features so you can take a guided look at what's new.

Welcome to the January 2021 newsletter. We hope you have had or are still having a good holiday break and could spend time with your loved ones, relax, and start the new year well. 2020 saw many disruptions in all areas of our lives. It also came with great sense of community with people helping each other out, finding novel solutions for sudden problems, and sharing what they have learned.

2021 has started with restrictions due to the ongoing pandemic in many parts of the world. Let's continue to #BeKind (the hashtag that was popularised in Aotearoa New Zealand during our first lockdown) and support each other.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara. The next newsletter will be published on 1 April 2021, and you can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Congratulations

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Lisa Donaldson from Dublin City University was appointed the the AAEEBL Board of Directors in 2020. She has extensive experience as portfolio practitioner, researcher, and support staff member. Along with colleagues, she leads the Irish portfolio community Eportfolio Ireland.

Helen Chen from the Executive Board of Directors of AAEEBL, writes:

We are thrilled to have Lisa's perspective and expertise on the AAEEBL Board to inform our shared work to support our growing network of international colleagues. Lisa enthusiastically contributed to our annual meeting in July 2020, and we look forward to her ongoing leadership in the field of ePortfolios as well as new opportunities for collaboration and engagement.

Congratulations, Lisa!

Mahara in use

Mahara tips in the Catalyst IT Europe advent calendar

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

My colleagues in our European office, Catalyst IT Europe, created their second annual advent calendar that also includes some tips for Mahara.

• Templates in Mahara: Set up templates on the site, institution, and group level
• Behat testing: Automate your manual test scenarios, many of which are already included in Mahara
• Mahara accessibility: Accessibility improvements in Mahara 20.10

If Moodle or Tōtara are your learning management system of choice, you will find many tips for using them in the advent calendar.

Enjoy.

Mahara in upcoming events

83rd Mahara developer meeting online, 19 January 2021

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Mahara developer meetings are an opportunity for community members to talk with Mahara developers, and for developers to discuss implementation questions or other technical questions. Our next Mahara developer meeting will take place on 19 January 2021 at 7:30 UTC. You are welcome to join this online session and participate. If you want to add anything to the agenda, please do so prior to the meeting.

Mahara Hui België en Nederland Online, 22 April 2021

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The first ever Mahara Hui Belgium and Netherlands will take place online on 22 April 2021. It is organised by Mahara Business Partner OpenEdu. The team is pleased to announce that Robert-Jan Simons (Visie of Leren) will be the keynote speaker and talk about motivation in digital education. I will be presenting upcoming features of Mahara 21.04.

If you'd like to share aspects of your portfolio journey or research, you can submit a proposal for a 20-minute presentation until 28 February 2021.

More information about the event will be made available over the coming weeks in the Mahara news forum and on the OpenEdu web site.

Mahara in past events

Mahara Open Forum, 24 November 2020

Mahara Open Forum 2020 (MOF2020) took place online on 24 November 2020. MOF is organised annually by the Japanese Mahara User Group (Japanese MUG).

The nine speakers shared their own experiences and practices in regard to using ePortfolios in five-minute lightning talks. They tied these to a range of other topics, including artificial intelligence, Google Drive, system log data, and the application LINE, an instant messenger app. Participants asked and answered questions about how Mahara is used at institutions across Japan, ePortfolio learning, and related topics.

After the lightning talks, small groups of four to five participants each exchanged questions and opinions about ePortfolio approaches in various contexts.

Next year, MOF2021 will take place at Oita University in Japan. We hope that COVID-19 will be under control, and we can exchange ideas again in person.

Introduction to Mahara and new features of Mahara 20.10, October - November 2020

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

In October and November 2020 I offered a number of online sessions as Mahara introductions and a chance to learn a bit more about the new features in Mahara 20.10. You can watch the recordings of these sessions:

• Introduction to Mahara
• New features in Mahara 20.10

There will be similar session for the Mahara 21.04 release at the end of April and the beginning of May 2021. Watch out for announcements on social media and in the Mahara news forum.

Eportfolio Forum, Melbourne, Australia, 29-30 October 2020

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Mahara in other news

MUG is looking for a new home

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

MUG, the Mahara User Group, is looking for a new organiser. Beth Gordon and her team at Pace University have been the main contact for the past few years and organised virtual as well as face-to-face events that made it possible to share research and practical advice as well as . It was founded originally, like other MUGs after it, to support the local community in the U.S.A., in particular the New York area. The geographic focus does not need to stay on New York.

If you are interested in learning more about what MUG organisers do, please get in touch with me.

Mahara is on the Matrix

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

The Mahara team has been using IRC for many years. These days, we are using Matrix more often. You can stop by in our Mahara channel and say hi. Please note that the core Mahara team lives in Aotearoa New Zealand and thus may not be online when you are. Leave a message in the channel, and we can get back to you.

The advantage of Matrix is that you can see previous messages even when you were not online. If you haven't used Matrix yet, it is similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams conversations, but with the added bonus that it is open source. We can also post directly to IRC from within Matrix and read IRC messages in our Matrix channel.

Welcome to the October 2020 newsletter. It's already been six months since we released Mahara 20.04, and now you have access to the preview version of Mahara 20.10, which is filled with some great new features. We will have free online events to introduce you to these new features.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara.

The next newsletter will be published on 1 January 2021, and you can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Congratulations

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Lisa Seeto, developer in the Catalyst Mahara team in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, became an approved developer for Mahara at the 81st Mahara developer meeting held on 8 September 2020. Lisa joins the ranks of our other approved developers who have well rounded understanding of Mahara and can approve work going into Mahara core after peer review.

She has been writing a number of new features for Mahara as well as bug fixes. Earlier in the year, she started on the analysis of the new accessibility standards WCAG 2.1 to provide an overview about our status quo in regard to supporting this standard.

Congratulations, Lisa!

Mahara in upcoming events

Introduction to Mahara, online, 28 October and 5 November 2020

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Most readers of this newsletter will be very familiar with Mahara. If you know of some people that might be interested in learning more about its capabilities, you can point them to our upcoming 'Introduction to Mahara'. It is an one-hour free online event. We are offering three separate sessions to make it possible for people from different time zones to attend.

Register for one of the intro sessions to secure your spot.

If you are in Wellington, you can register for a free face-to-face event (current COVID-19 alert level in Wellington permitting) on 22 October 2020.

Eportfolio Forum, Melbourne, Australia, 29-30 October 2020

Allison Miller (ePortfolios Australia)

82nd Mahara developer meeting online, 3 November 2020

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

Mahara developer meetings are an opportunity for those interested in contributing to Mahara through features and bug fixes to chat with other developers online. Our next Mahara developer meeting will take place on 3 November 2020 at 7:30 UTC. You are welcome to join this online session and participate. If you want to add anything to the agenda, please do so prior to the meeting.

What's new in Mahara 20.10, online, 4-6 November 2020

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

In a few weeks, we will release Mahara 20.10 and want to give you the opportunity to learn about the major new features in a webinar. You can choose from four sessions that cater to different time zones.

Register for this free online event.

Mahara in development

Mahara 20.10 preview version

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

October marks our second release per year, and we expect it to be available in the second half of the month as usual. We'd like to invite you to preview this latest version of Mahara now before we bring out the stable release of Mahara 20.10. That gives you the opportunity to see what's coming up, and you can let us know if something doesn't quite work as you expected.

We implemented a range of features that span many different areas of Mahara to support enhancements in these areas. Some highlights are:

Mahara and Docker

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, Aotearoa New Zealand)

There will be many new features in Mahara 20.10. We will also have support for Docker built in as an early prototype release. That will make it easier for you to run your Mahara site in the cloud, coupled with tools like Kubernetes. You can use it for testing and developing purposes and get set up quickly with an instance. The readme file contains instructions for the running of Mahara in that Docker image. Container ahoi!

Welcome to the July 2020 newsletter. We hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. We have all experienced various levels of isolation, distancing, and regulated measures over the last three months (and in some cases longer), and are coping as best as we can. In this newsletter we want to share some good news from the Mahara community and point out some events that you may be interested in attending virtually.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara.

The next newsletter will be published on 1 October 2020, and you can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Mahara in use

Curate art

David Bell (eCentre for Trinity-at-Waiake Methodist Church, New Zealand)

Our kiwiconnexion.nz group finds Mahara a very useful tool for curating art projects.

I begin with traditional methods of printmaking  and then re-imagine the prints into contemporary settings, including video. For example, I had done a couple of MDF (medium-density fibreboard) woodcuts and was happy with the prints pulled from them. It was a sequence of six monotypes to illustrate the A E Housman poem "How Clear, How Lovely Bright".. A lot more prints were rejected.

When I had the sequence I wanted, I then invited John McWade to add narration and typography, and Michael Bell to add music.  Thus we created a little jewel-box video (1:30): poem, narration, prints, and music. The complete process is illustrated and curated in Mahara on Kiwiconnexion, making it more than useful for our group's purposes on Facebook and YouTube.

Mahara in upcoming events

Mahara UK and Ireland Virtual Hui, 15 July 2020

Sam Taylor (Catalyst IT Europe, United Kingdom)

Spaces are still available for the free Mahara UK & Ireland Virtual Hui 2020, with speakers being announced soon. The day will be a combination of presentations from the community, user group meetings, workshops, and an 'Ask the expert' session with Teresa Mackinnon (University of Warwick), Lisa Donaldson (Dublin City University), Roger Emery (Solent University), and Peter Spicer (Catalyst IT Europe), all kicked off with a keynote presentation from Mahara Project Lead and Community Facilitator Kristina Hoeppner.

Although this event is mostly focussed on the UK and Ireland, our international friends are more than welcome to attend - we’d love to see you!

Sign up today.

Over 100 guests have already registered and below is the breakdown of where they are coming from. We look forward to welcoming you to the event.

80th Mahara developer meeting online, 22 July 2020

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

Mahara developer meetings are an opportunity for those interested in contributing to Mahara through features and bug fixes to chat with other developers online. Our next Mahara developer meeting will take place on 22 July 2020 at 7:30 UTC. You are welcome to join this online session and participate. If you want to add anything to the agenda, please do so prior to the meeting.

Eportfolio Forum, Melbourne, Australia, 29-30 October 2020

Allison Miller (ePortfolios Australia)

The ePortfolios Australia Organising Committee are pleased to announce that the ninth Eportfolio Forum will be held on 29-30 October 2020 online or if possible at Deakin University (Burwood campus) in Melbourne, Australia.

This year's theme is 'Digital Identity – Ethics and Experience'.

The Call for Proposals is still open for all but peer-reviewed papers, and you can submit your proposals until 22 July 2020.

Proposal types include:

• 20×20 presentation
• Digitally interactive poster
• Intensive workshop
• In-depth workshop
• Facilitate a professional conversation
• Short (peer-reviewed paper) presentation (closed; no more submissions possible)

For more information or to enquire about presenting or the Forum, please contact [email protected].

Previous Eportfolio Forum resources are available.

To stay up to date about this year's Forum, other ePortfolios Australia activities and eportfolio news, subscribe to:

• ePortfolios Australia updates
• ePortfolio Australia blog

Mahara in development

Mahara 20.04

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

The Catalyst IT Mahara team released Mahara 20.04 on schedule on 29 April 2020. There is a long list of new features available in this release. Watch the release video for a quick overview.

If you'd like to see a recording of one of the webinars in which the features are introduced with a bit more explanations, you can choose from seven in English, and one in German.

Mahara Mobile 20.06 for Android (beta)

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

A new version of Mahara Mobile has been in the works by the Catalyst team. We'd like to invite you to take a look at it and give it a go. You can get it in the Android store. The iOS version still takes a little while. The app doesn't just come with a fresh new look but also a new underlying architecture, being built on React Native. If you already have Mahara Mobile installed, please uninstall it and then add this latest app. Due to the new architecture, it's not possible to perform an upgrade.

Mahara assignment submission plugin for Moodle and Totara

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

Thanks to funding from Waitematā District Health Board, Monash University, and Catalyst IT, the Mahara assignment submission plugin for Moodle will be made available shortly, using LTI and web services as the connection rather than MNet. Organisations wanting to use a fuller set of assessment features for their portfolios will now be able to do so in both Moodle and Totara.

The full set of features will be available in Mahara 20.10. However, if you want to use the functionality already now, you can backport it to Mahara 20.04 or earlier. We can also assist you with that.

I will give a demo of the plugin at MoodleMoot Global Online on 8 July 2020 in the German track.

Welcome to the April 2020 newsletter. We only recently entered a new decade and are now in unprecedented times with the pandemic and lots of changes resulting in particular for education at a rapid rate. In this newsletter you can find tips on using Mahara in tried-and-trusted scenarios as well as in ways that you might not have considered in the past.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara.

The next newsletter will be published on 1 July 2020, and you can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Mahara in use

Mahara to support changes in teaching and learning

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

The current COVID-19 pandemic has all of us in its grip. No doubt, many of you have seen an exponential rise in requests for online delivery and how to continue teaching when physical schools and campuses are closed for weeks and potentially months, and even after that more remote options may be the 'new normal'. Rapid changes in course and content delivery are only the tip of the iceberg though.

Because of the general fear for one's own and other people's health, uncertainty, and in many places measures put in place to limit movements outside one's immediate home, it is not only switching to fully online learning and teaching that we are encountering at an accelerated rate. We need to consider how these changed circumstances affect our learners and how we can support them to cope and adjust. We can't have interactions like we are used to for the time being. So how can we help learners and keep the human touch without resorting to 24/7 in front of a web conferencing tool?

While Mahara is used primarily as a portfolio platform, it has capabilities beyond that and can assist in a wide range of education scenarios. Now more than ever, having a platform where learners can collect their thoughts, learning experiences, reflect on them, and in particular share with others is a good way of keeping in touch and connected. Mahara's motto is: Create. Share. Engage. Let's continue doing that.

You may also wish to think about changing assessment formats and how your Mahara instance can support that switch. Lisa Donaldson from Dublin City University in Ireland reports that several faculty are thinking of using Mahara more because there students can publish case studies, reports, and create online projects in a cohesive manner. For example, instead of being able to attend a performance, Arts students review online footage and focus on different aspects of a production that they then review and critique.

I'd like to share a 15 suggestions that relate to Mahara and how it could be used to support students and teaching staff. These are ideas that Mahara community members may already ponder or have lots of experience with, and I invite you to share your own ideas.

• Set up a group where students can chat asynchronously and get in touch with them. The good old 'Lounge' (in a film studies course one instructor called it the 'Reel Café') that I've seen on learning management systems in courses where students could post anything and everything not related to a particular assignment can be replicated on Mahara. We do not need to do everything synchronously.
• Add a picture to your group homepage and remove blocks that you don't need.
• Research and write book reports, movie reviews etc. Carmel Unified School District has some examples. Templates can be used to guide the research.
• Document case studies.
• Write reports.
• Participate in projects and document progress as well as what has been learned in a collection structuring the project utilising pages within the collection.
• Encourage students to create their reflections as audio or video and upload them to Mahara, either via their computer or mobile device.
• Set up plans filled with mandatory and optional activities. From Mahara 19.10 on you can create plans in groups (or create a master plan in your personal account and then copy it into groups and adjust there) and attach individual portfolio templates to plan tasks for students to get started quickly. Your students can then decide which tasks they want to complete and only these are copied into their personal portfolio area.
• Encourage your students to give each other feedback on their work. This can be done privately so only the student and feedback giver can see the comment or publicly for everyone to see who has access to the portfolio.
• Attach your audio (or video) feedback to an artefact or a page.
• Submit portfolios for assessment purposes either directly to a Mahara group or via your LMS.
• Don't work with an LMS? No problem. Create your course resources pages in Mahara either in a group or in your personal account.
• Hold support sessions online and embed a web conferencing room (or link to it) into your support page for easy access for the students to join when you are live. Dublin City University had success with its first remote support session recently. Use the functionality of the tool to share your or a student's screen to walk them through an issue they are having.
• Keep your professional portfolio up to date. You are changing your teaching rapidly and probably also innovate a great deal. Capture that and reflect now or later on it.
• Collect learning evidence and document learning experiences using a competency framework that you can build in SmartEvidence (a site administrator needs to upload it or use the built-in framework editor, depending on your version of Mahara) to connect learning to particular competencies.

Mahara in upcoming events

79th Mahara developer meeting online, 29 April 2020

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

Mahara developer meetings are an opportunity for those interested in contributing to Mahara through features and bug fixes to chat with other developers online. Our next Mahara developer meeting will take place on 29 April 2020 at 7:30 UTC. You are welcome to join this online session and participate. If you want to add anything to the agenda, please do so prior to the meeting.

Eportfolio Forum, Melbourne, Australia, 29-30 October 2020

Allison Miller (ePortfolios Australia)

The ePortfolios Australia Organising Committee are pleased to announce that the ninth Eportfolio Forum will be held on 29-30 October 2020 at Deakin University (Burwood campus) in Melbourne, Australia.

This year's theme is 'Digital Identity – Ethics and Experience'

The Call for Proposals is now open, and you can submit your proposals until 18 May 2020.

Proposal types include:

• Short (peer-reviewed paper) presentation
• 20×20 presentation
• Digitally interactive poster
• Intensive workshop
• In-depth workshop
• Facilitate a professional conversation

For more information or to enquire about presenting or the Forum, please contact [email protected].

Keynote presenters will be announced shortly.

Previous Eportfolio Forum resources are available.

To stay up to date about this year's Forum, other ePortfolios Australia activities and ePortfolio news, subscribe to:

• ePortfolios Australia updates
• ePortfolio Australia blog

Hui20, Zurich, Switzerland, 27-28 November 2020

Dietmar Johlen (Lpaso - Institut für Lernkultur, Germany)

Die Hui steht in diesem Jahr unter dem Motto "In Netzwerken lernen" und soll am 27. und 28. November 2020 in Zusammenarbeit mit tbfpartner, Zürich, stattfinden. In diesen besonderen Tagen können wir nur sagen, dass wir an dem Termin festhalten wollen, und wenn ein Zusammenkommen in Zürich nicht möglich ist, machen wir ein digitales Angebot. Wer tbfpartner kennenlernen möchte, kann sich z.B. ihre Keynote auf der letzten Hui über die Lpaso-Webseite ansehen.

Schaut das Video von Hui19 an, um einen Einblick in das Barcamp vom letzten Jahr in Kassel zu bekommen.

---

The topic for Hui20 is "Learning in networks" and will take place in cooperation with tbfpartner in Zurich (Switzerland) on 27 and 28 November 2020. We are still planning to host the event, but if it were not possible to convene in Zurich, we will be offering an online version. If you'd like to get to know what tbfpartner do in the area of innovative learning, watch their keynote from Hui19 (in German) via the Lpaso web site.

Watch the Hui19 video for a recap of last year's event in Kassel, Germany.

Mahara in past events

Eportfolio Ireland National Forum Seminar Series event, 20 February 2020

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

Eportfolio Ireland, with support from the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching & Learning, held a seminar at Dublin City University on 20 February 2020 to introduce the findings from the national ePortfolio survey that was open to Irish institutions since November 2019. Mahara plays a large role at Irish institutions and has a solid following there, being the most used ePortfolio platform. More detailed results from the survey will be available later this year. Right now, take a look at the infographic for a high level overview.

Mahara in development

Mahara 20.04

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

The Catalyst team in Wellington is working hard to deliver Mahara 20.04 by the end of April. We all relocated to our homes and have been working entirely remotely since 23/24 March 2020 and expect to continue to work from home for the majority of April if not longer due to the lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand.

We are adjusting to working this way looking into how we can move normal office interactions into the online space, and also dealing with the restrictions that would typically not be part of a 'working from home' day or time period. We continue to work and are available to the Mahara community and our clients. Please bear with us when asking for free support in the community forums as we may not be able to reply as quickly as you are used to due to the current circumstances and also being in release preparation time.

Mahara 20.04 comes with a series of new features, in particular for organisations wanting to take more advantage of single sign-on and automating role assignment and some other administrative tasks. Watch out for the announcement of the preview version of Mahara 20.04 that will be released in the first week of April. We invite you to test it out in a test site on your own infrastructure to test all features, or on one of our test sites with access to a subset of features, i.e. all features but those restricted to site administrators. We look forward to your feedback to help us make some last minute adjustments for the initial official release of Mahara 20.04 by the end of April 2020.

We are thinking about organising a few online sessions to introduce the new features and be available for Q&A. Please watch out for the announcements in the 'News' forum, on Twitter, and other social media mid-April.

Mahara Mobile

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

There is more cooking in Wellington in the Catalyst Mahara team. We are working on a new version of Mahara Mobile, built using React Native. We are in the final stages of the development for the Android app and expect to make a preview version available to the community by the end of April. A version for iOS may still take a bit because of the disruptions caused by COVID-19.

Mahara new service: Extended security support

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

Sometimes it can be difficult for organisations to stay in step with our development cycle and upgrade to a new version of Mahara every six months or even just once a year. We support each version of Mahara for 18 months with security updates and high importance bug fixes as they are made known to us and prioritised by our team. Once a Mahara version becomes unsupported, security updates are not provided for it though they may still apply.

We went over to the six-monthly timed release cycle several years to make new features available fairly rapidly yet still allow the organisations that work with Mahara stable releases for a good period of time. The majority of organisations using Mahara is in the education sector and thus operates on an annual cycle. Our releases fall into that nicely by offering one release for the Northern hemisphere before the summer holidays, the April version, and one for the Southern hemisphere, the October version. Of course, no matter where you are in the world, you can install any release.

Recognising that not every organisation may be able to upgrade once a year at minimum, we are now offering a premium service that extends the security support for a version of Mahara by two years, coming to a total of 3.5 years instead of the community-provided one of 1.5 years. If you are interested to learn more about it, check out the extended security support web page.

Welcome to the January 2020 newsletter, the first in this new decade. We wish you a successful year ahead in which you can spread your wings and flex your learning muscles. We look forward to learning and innovating together with you.

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara.

The next newsletter will be published on 1 April 2020, and you can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Mahara in use

Mahara for assessment

Marieke Guy and Chantal Schipper (Royal Agricultural University, UK)

This semester has seen us use Mahara ePortfolio as the main assessment for our shared core first year module on academic skills. The module has just shy of 250 students on it, and so our approach has been to push a standard template out to all students on the module. While use of a locked-down template (all blocks are locked and students can only add in specified types of content) is not conducive to creativity, it has allowed us to introduce Mahara as a tool to both staff and students in a fairly secure and risk-free way. In a recent blog post we share the first stages in the process of integrating Mahara into the academic skills module.

Since then we have run a comprehensive training session with academic staff who will be carrying out the assessment on the module. The training supported in creating a Mahara portfolio, submitting it to our Moodle VLE (Virtual Learning Environment), and then marking each other’s submissions using a clear rubric. We have also created a number of guidance materials, including videos, for students on how to edit their portfolios, and we have run several 'surgery' sessions for students to trouble shoot issues.

The main submission date for the portfolios is looming, and the next challenge will be the co-ordinated release of the grades and feedback.

A few words of appreciation

Kelli Fleming and Truc Pham (Future Generations University, U.S.A.)

The Master of Arts in Applied Community Development students at Future Generations University use Mahara to create showcase portfolios of their work through the program.

Truc Pham, a recent graduate in the Applied Community Development program, shares "A Few Words of Appreciation":

I have changed from not being a big fan of Mahara at the beginning of the course to very much appreciative of this platform.

I remember in the survey after semester 1, I wrote these lines:

Technology is not my cup of tea.
It brings me stress and anxiety.
......................................................
But maybe next Spring,
I will be saying:
" Love you too, MAHARA!"

The truth is that it was not the "next Spring" but the next Fall that I realized how Mahara has brought me the rainbow instead of just the plain black-and-white style I used to present my work.

There was so much challenge. There was so much hard work. However, it worths all these seeing that I could improve my knowledge and with this capacity, I could make my community a better place to live.

I began my community presentation of this Spotlight ePortfolio by saying to them: "I started this Master course with Hope and Dram. And, this is what I have achieved. If I could do it, then everyone could do it!"

ePortfolios for educators - a workshop concept

Sam Taylor (Catalyst IT Europe, UK)

At Catalyst IT Europe I created a workshop concept for all those who want to explore the benefits of using an ePortfolio for evidencing growth: personally, professionally, or academically. It is full of activities that will help educators shape a great assignment brief and ensure all boxes are ticked with regards to planning all the way through to assessment. Although it's meant to be ePortfolio agnostic, it uses Mahara throughout.

This workshop idea is available under the Creative Commons license BY-SA 4.0.

Mahara in upcoming events

Mahara in development

Plugin: Mahara library

Guillaume Nerzic (Birkbeck University of London, UK)

Developed as part of a Learning Technologies MSc project at Birkbeck University London, the "Mahara Library" is an artefact plugin (and associated group type) to manage a library of publications. Embedded within the library artefact is a simple and extendible recommender system that suggests publications that learners may choose to read based on a group's collective recommendations.

This plugin aims to provide a community of practice learning environment in two complimentary ways: first by allowing members of the group to learn collaboratively through the common task of managing, reviewing, and contributing to a shared library; and second through a recommender system that prompts learners to get a 360° view of the library's content and not simply focus on popular publications.

Future releases of the plugin will focus on implementing a smarter and more streamlined recommender system and a way to visualise the library's semantic structure.

Request for comments: SmartEvidence enhancements

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

SmartEvidence was first developed in 2016 following an idea conceived by Misty Kirby and Shane Nuessler from the University of Canberra in 2014. It makes it possible for learners to track their achievements against a competency framework and visualise the progress via an evidence map. In its initial implementation, SmartEvidence works with pages so that evidence can be displayed in context as not every single piece of evidence may fulfill the requirements of a standard but contributes to it and may also need a reflection going with it.

Over the past year, the Mahara team at Catalyst has been gathering more feedback from institutions on how SmartEvidence is working for them and what would be good to change on it to make it more useful in contexts where it has not yet been used. Together with Lisa Donaldson and Mark Glynn from Dublin City University we developed an initial idea for expanding SmartEvidence to work for more complex frameworks that are structured into different levels of accomplishment, which would make it possible to map competencies over larger time frames, without needing to create separate SmartEvidence collections. With a client of ours in New Zealand, we investigated the possibility of mapping individual pieces of evidence to competencies rather than pages as that was more in line with the assessment of the work of apprentices.

At Hui 19 in Kassel (Germany) in November 2019, I had the opportunity to chat with Alex Del Ponte and Karsten Wolf from University of Bremen, who recently contributed a large enhancement to the plans in Mahara 19.10. As they are also interested in competency frameworks, we discussed how SmartEvidence could be expanded to meet needs at their university (and others) better, drawing on previous discussions and ideas.

You can see a first draft of the idea outlined on the wiki. We'd like to invite you to comment in this idea. If you are interested in funding enhancements to SmartEvidence (or any other parts of Mahara), please get in touch with me.

This is the October 2019 edition of the Mahara newsletter. Happy spring or fall, depending on where you are in the world. You are probably wondering when you will be able to get your hands on Mahara 19.10. Read on...

If you want to share your Mahara journey, please send us an article for this newsletter. We'd love to hear how you are using Mahara.

The next newsletter will be published on 1 January 2020, and you can send articles to [email protected].

The Mahara Newsletter is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license 3.0.

Call for participation

Success stories

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

We have lots of knowledge in our community on how people work, study, learn, and teach with Mahara. This very newsletter here is a testament to the multitude of ways of supporting students, faculty, and others on their learning journeys. Sometimes, these stories can get buried a bit after some time and may not be able to be found so easily again.

Therefore, we are in the process of collecting stories of Mahara use around the world to feature in our success stories. If you are interested in contributing, please get in touch with me so I can send you the details and the template. We have not yet taken this new section live as we would like to have a few stories already in it before making it available.

AAEEBL task force: Ethics and ePortfolios

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

The Association for Authentic, Experiential and Experience-based Learning (AAEEBL) is established the task force "Ethics and ePortfolios" and is looking for practitioners and researchers amongst its members to participate in this year-long programme. If you are interested, you have a few hours left to express your interest on 1 October 2019. Even if you are not participating in the task force itself, you may be involved by being interviewed and can learn about the outcomes.

Read the announcement for more information.

Mahara in use

Personal branding: Writing for a social media audience

Steven Bookman (Pace University, U.S.A.)

Pace University uses Mahara to assess students' knowledge and evaluate programs. It is also used to tell students' personal stories.

My reason for using Mahara is not about assessing a student's knowledge. The main purpose is to use it as a source for having a positive online presence, as well as for showing students' skills. Mahara is complete personal branding.

My students create an ePortfolio using Mahara by following a set of guidelines, which come from videos from recruiters, a lecture from Career Services, and my experiences. The purpose of this assignment with Mahara is to have students learn how to write for a social media audience, in particular recruiters. All my students, whether they are freshmen or seniors, do this assignment. It is vital for them to understand the world they will be entering when they apply for internships and look for jobs when they are about to graduate.

By having students create an ePortfolio, they have created a positive online presence for them. Creating an ePortfolio has opened their eyes to how they will be viewed by future recruiters and employers. Many students see their accomplishments differently, and they mean more to them having them on the ePortfolio. They feel much more comfortable in the search for internships and jobs now that they have created an ePortfolio.

Mahara in upcoming events

Mahara in development

Preview version of Mahara 19.10

Kristina Höppner (Catalyst, New Zealand)

It is October now and you may be wondering when you will be able to take a look at the preview version of Mahara 19.10. Very soon is the answer. We have a large number of exciting new features and changes in this version. As many of them are quite large, they take a bit longer to finalise. We are working very hard to get this preview version out to you. Watch out for an announcement in the news forum early in the week of 7 October 2019.

Recently, I gave a presentation at Mahara Open Forum showcasing some of these new features. If you want to see the slides with English titles, check out the English version of the presentation.

A few of the new features include:

• Placeholder block, whose working title was "Magic block" (thanks to Dublin City University)
• More flexible layout options (thanks to Catalyst)
• Plans enhancement to automatically create tasks and assign portfolios (thanks to University of Bremen)
• Comments and details mode when viewing a page (thanks to Catalyst)
• Re-submission of portfolios via LTI (thanks to University of Sussex)
• Page header can have personal background colour or image (thanks to Catalyst)

There are many more that you will be able to test shortly. We look forward to your feedback.