What is Mahara
Mahara is an open-source ePortfolio system that brings a creative aspect to the eLearning space. Students and learners can record evidence of lifelong learning and collaborate with their peers.
Mahara also allows students and learners to create online blogs, build resumes and interact with their classmates and teachers. You can think of Mahara as an educational, social networking platform.
ePortfolios with Mahara can be a single page or a collection of pages that are designed and customised by the user. The primary purpose of an ePortfolio is to display artefacts. Artefacts are elements or pieces of content, like images, essays, artwork and journal entries that highlight a student’s learning journey or achievements. Mahara gives the user full control over which artefacts they want to showcase on their portfolio.
Mahara can be thought of as an extension of the paper-based portfolio, with the benefit of being accessible anywhere with internet access.
Mahara Plugin Benefits
A key benefit of Mahara is that it is a flexible online system that can be customised to the user’s needs.
- Personalised: Mahara enables users to build a fully-customised portfolio and share it with whom they want.
- Collaboration: Users can create project portfolios together and interact via discussion forums. Mahara encourages social interaction.
- SmartEvidence: SmartEvidence allows you to align your portfolio to a competency framework, helping you visualise learning over time and track competencies achieved.
Alternatively, you could use the portfolio completionprogress page to quickly see how many sign-offs and verifications have been completed in the portfolio.
- Open source: Mahara is built on an open-source and open principles framework. The application is 100% free.
- Customisable: Mahara enables administrators to tailor the site to your institution’s specific needs. Customise design features, add new functionalities, edit language strings, and more.
- Mobile: The Mahara CMS is accessible on any device via responsive design including mobile.
- Integration: Web services facilitate the use of the Mahara application alongside your learning management system and other services.
- Scalable: Mahara CMS has been designed to be scaled. Whether you are working with just a few learners or multiple institutions with thousands of users on one sit.
- Journals/Blogs: The Mahara platform enables users to record their thoughts and experiences online with comprehensive journal and blogging tools.
- Reporting: The Mahara plugin is equipped with a built-in reporting engine that collects data when the site is used available for individuals for learning analytics opportunities.
At eWorks, we use web services to connect moodle with Mahara. This allows for greater interoperability between the systems.
What Mahara Offers: Data and Security
Here’s what you can expect from the Mahara plugin:
- Unlimited named user accounts
- Unlimited data storage (fair use applies)
- Unrestricted network bandwidth for uploads and downloads (fair use applies)
- Daily backup and long-term storage of DB
- 24x7x365 server monitoring and disaster recovery of the application to replacement hardware if required
- Free major version upgrades, up to once per annum
- Free minor version security patching as required
The Mahara Plugin in Action
Video: Connecting Mahara to Moodle - Presented by Kristina Hoeppner, Catalyst
If you’d like further information, or you’d like to request a demo of the Mahara plugin, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us here at eWorks LMS