The second Machara meeting took place on 29th November, again in Glasgow - something we hope to address as a national user group (attendees and hosts please). The agenda was kept fairly simple:

• Welcome & Introductions
• Mahara 1.8 New Features
• Discussion –  Improving Usability & Workflow

• Discussion – Next Event
• Any Other Business
• Creating Mahara Skins (Demo)

Thanks go to Lee Ballantyne for taking the notes and pictures I've used to put together this post.

 Attendees: Gordon McLeod (University of Glasgow) (Chair), Lee Ballantyne (City of Glasgow College), Craig Brown (University of Glasgow), Jenny Crow (University of the West of Scotland), Chris Kennedy (University of Glasgow), Bill Steele (University of the West of Scotland), Alex Walker (City of Glasgow College), Ali Hastie (Barony College).

Gordon kicked off with an overview of the new features in Mahara 1.8 - sporting his brand new Machara t-shirt!

 Copy of Presentation

Videos from the presentation can be found in the Videos section of this group
https://mahara.org/group/machara/videos

Ali Hastie then took over with an impromptu demonstration of his student newsletter project - congratulations on the award!

There’s an outline of the project here (which includes links to the newsletters)

https://mahara.org/view/artefact.php?artefact=310029&view=96479

It’s been a great success in terms of engaging students with Mahara and developing (and showcasing) a wide range of skills, and this was recently recognised at the College Development Network Annual Awards where the project won the Student Enterprise Award.

A quick session was also given by Alex Walker on the "Timeline" feature at City of Glasgow College - which is gave us food for thought for integrating systems and presenting information back to people.

This discussion unfortunately didn't generate much in the way of solutions - the intent had been to look at usability from the viewpoint of 'what would make it better' rather than what people don't like, but there were a number of common themes around templates and sharing which relate to the assessment workflow. One specific suggestion was that it would be useful to have some generic template pages available in the core Mahara package as a starting point for institutions and users, so that the 'blank canvas' doesn't cause users to fall at the first hurdle. The new layout for editing content in 1.8 will certainly help to make adding content much more user friendly, but SAMPLE TEMPLATES might be a worthwhile exercise in showcasing what Mahara can do.

There was also a call for an in-depth user-experience-testing to take place with actual students. We weren't sure to what level this already takes place (the recent focus on improving accessibility suggests things are gearing up in this area).

An interesting usability example happened as we were discusing the new 1.8 features. While editing a journal directly on the page it is being displayed on is great, when you save the changes to the journal it drops you back in the journal - rather than on the page you were editing.

We all agreed we should be more involved in feeding back issues on Mahara.org.

We talked about arranging an event in February which would have more of a conference feel with more input from academic staff and less from learning technologists. It was agreed February or March might be a good time and we were all tasked with considering venues and speakers.

The proposed topics are as follows:

• Communication & Outreach
• Enhancing Learning
• Enhancing Reflection
• Portfolio Development
• Enhancing Employability
• Assessment

We have 2 offers of venues, but details and speakers need to be confirmed ASAP, and volunteers are wanted to help organise the event - so it is suggested that we move to a March date at the earliest.

Finally, Gordon finished off with a demo of creating Mahara skins in 1.8. This isn't something that we see typical users doing (it currently needs too much technical know-how for anything more than basic colour changes), but it will be a great feature for more creative / technical users, and for site administrators and developers to theme on the fly.