Mahara is an ePortfolio solution that supports people on their learning journeys to document and reflect on their learning. Portfolios capture milestones and reflections on a learner’s progress. It’s important to continue to improve the platform by taking into account advances in technology and changing learner expectations. To ensure the right things are being worked on to support both learners and educators, the Mahara project team’s work is influenced by feature suggestions from the wider community. The Mahara team at Catalyst is pleased to release its product roadmap which is influenced by community input. It captures the direction that the Mahara team is taking over the next five years.
To learn what new Mahara features and updates are happening, you can watch a video overview by Mahara Project Lead Kristina Hoeppner.
Alternatively, you can read the roadmap below.
Mahara roadmap
The Mahara roadmap aims to enhance portfolio features, usability, collaboration, infrastructure, and long-term success. It is divided into three parts: short term, medium term, and long term. Additionally, the roadmap is separated into three categories:
- Create: focus on everything around the portfolio creation process.
- Engage: focus on engaging and collaborating with others on the platform around portfolios.
- Manage: focus on the technical infrastructure of Mahara.
Mahara short term roadmap
The short term roadmap focuses primarily on features for Mahara 24.04, which will be released by the end of April 2024. Some features may be delivered later in the year. Below is a high-level overview of the new Mahara features and updates you can expect during this time frame.
Create
- The ability to use a single page in multiple collections, so there’s no need to duplicate the evidence of work.
- To support learners in their reflections, there will be a proof of concept for Riff AI reflection bot integration. Riff sends prompts to learners to encourage deeper reflections to aid their learning. Test out Riff's prompts.
- New options for learners to reflect on their learning or professional development. Instead of just text as an option, learners can record audio and video within a block.
- To prevent accidentally deleted content from being gone forever, there will be the option to retrieve deleted text in a 'Text' or 'Note' block.
Engage
- Easier bug reporting and feature suggestions via a ‘send report’ in your own Mahara instance.
- In SmartEvidence, there will be an additional assessment status of ‘Merit’ available when reviewing learners’ work.
- Also new in SmartEvidence is the option to have multiple assessors review and grade assessments. This includes the option of learners completing self-assessments as well.
Manage
- OpenID Connect will be supported natively in Mahara, which simplifies the use of Microsoft Azure AD, for example.
- Experimental support for dark mode for accessibility.
- Managing accounts in Mahara via single sign-on to have one account for all sites that require a login on the community infrastructure, in particular the community website and our Git instance.
The Mahara team will also be pre-planning for the medium term roadmap with the following:
- Developing a principle based framework for data and tech, so it’s clearer to Mahara community members how the Mahara project perceives data and tech. This will cover such things as data privacy, data residency, principles around open source, and integrations.
- Beginning a wider usability review, so the team can know where to focus future efforts to improve Mahara.
- Researching and planning a new portfolio look.
Mahara medium term roadmap
The medium term roadmap covers one to two years, up to the release in 2026.
Create
- Implementing a new portfolio look based on the findings in the short term roadmap.
- Reviewing findings from AI projects for potential meaningful integration.
- Adding the ability to map artefacts against standards using a rubric.
- Connecting external file storage, for example, Nextcloud, Google Drive, and OneDrive.
- Adding forms for scaffolding learner responses.
Engage
- Improving secret URLs so only specified people can access the link, even if they don't have an account.
- Inviting someone to comment via '@name', which has become a standard on many social media platforms.
- Being able to submit group portfolios for assessment.
- Adding better assessment options that need to be more defined.
- Improving sharing options to make sharing on social media easier.
Manage
- Becoming a Learning Tools Operability (LTI) consumer so Mahara is the primary platform and other platforms can connect to it, such as BigBlueButton, virtual classroom software.
- Enabling data to be exported with full data references in JSON format, which will lead to improved GDPR compliance, for example.
- Including a template library to find and use shared templates more easily.
- Ensuring Mahara is WCAG 2.2+ compliant.
- Implementing usability changes.
Mahara long term roadmap
The long term roadmap covers the remaining three years, 2026-2029.
Create
- Tighter integration with Mahara Mobile so it’s easier for learners to collect evidence through their mobile devices and add it to portfolios in a more straightforward way.
- Visualising portfolio content.
- Including an offline portfolio editor so learners can work on their portfolios even without an internet connection.
- Adding functionality to create content in multiple languages.
Engage
- Becoming a Learning Record Store, so all learning records are stored in Mahara.
- Adding collaborative synchronous editing.
- Becoming an Open Badge issuer and more flexible displayer.
Manage
- Developing a flexible role system, so you can tailor your roles to your organisation.
- Easier web service connections.
- Easier plugin management.
Staying up to date with Mahara
The Mahara roadmap is built on community input, is open to feedback, and will evolve over time. At the time of publishing, the roadmap reflects features suggestions from the community and the project team. If you’d like to contribute suggestions or support the development of certain features, you can contact the Mahara team at Catalyst.
To hear the latest news about Mahara, you can sign up for Catalyst’s Mahara newsletter or listen to our podcast hosted by Kristina Hoeppner, the Mahara project lead at Catalyst ‘Create. Share. Engage.’