The Catalyst Mahara project team released Mahara 24.04 on 26 April 2024. The new release includes improvements to make Mahara easier to use. Below, we have detailed the latest features in Mahara 24.04, otherwise, you can watch a video overview by Mahara Project Lead Kristina Hoeppner.
New Mahara features
Some highlights of this release are the following.
Portfolio creation
- The Continuing Professional Development (CPD) plugin is now part of Mahara core. Essentially, this makes it easy to track and display your CPD hours in your portfolio. Plus, we've expanded the available options. Thank you to a number of clients in Aotearoa, New Zealand, who jointly contributed to this feature.
- Retrieve deleted text. Don’t worry about losing content if you accidentally delete it. Learn more about retrieving deleted content in our video.
- Encourage deeper reflection from your learners with AI. You can embed the AI reflection bot Riff within Mahara to support your learners. If you’re interested in learning more about digital ethics in portfolios, check out the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force’s principles.
- Quickly copy blocks on a page to stay in your workflow. For example, when you set up templates for your learners or in your own portfolios as an educator.
- View recently used blocks at the top of your page. The change in the layout issue tracker saves time searching for what you want to use when creating content.
- Add multiple assessors and an extra assessment status of ‘Merit’ to your SmartEvidence framework. Thank you to AP Hogeschool Antwerpen for funding this functionality.
Other changes
- Learners can report bugs to an administrator from within Mahara. As the administrator, you’ll receive the full error message and can follow up with the reporter directly.
- Work in dark mode. The 'Default' and 'Raw' themes are automatically enabled to support it.
- Other new features are on our issue tracker, which our subscribers can access. Plus, you can view additional documentation about the new Mahara features in the Mahara manual for Mahara 24.04.
Mahara support
Catalyst began development work on Mahara since the project's inception in 2006. Since then, we have been the maintainer and primary development company for Mahara. Our Mahara experts are passionate about supporting the use of portfolios in both education and professional organisations to showcase learning achievements and growth. If you have any questions about the new release or are interested in getting Mahara support directly from the Mahara project team, contact us.
To keep up to date with the latest in portfolios:
- Listen to our portfolio podcast 'Create. Share. Engage.'
- Subscribe to our monthly Mahara newsletter.