The Mahara platform is a proven portfolio solution used all over the world. It is an integrated space for students and professionals to curate their educational evidence, competencies, and achievements. Plus, Mahara ePortfolio offers a wealth of features making it a versatile and indispensable tool to document and reflect on learning. So, in this blog post, we’re providing an introduction to Mahara and outlining its key benefits.
What is Mahara?
Firstly, it’s key to understand that Mahara is a flexible portfolio solution. It is an online space for learners to create, manage, and showcase portfolios tailored to their specific learning needs and goals. Mahara is an effective solution for:
- Students looking to document their learning journey.
- Educators seeking a comprehensive portfolio assessment tool.
- Professionals aiming to showcase their achievements and prepare for accreditation or certification.
Portfolio creation made easy
With Mahara, you can reflect on your learning experiences, upload files, and seamlessly integrate content you created elsewhere on the internet, including from social media sites.
The platform offers the flexibility to create various types of portfolios, such as those for learning, presentation, assessment, certification, or group projects. Moreover, you have complete control over who can access your portfolios and provide feedback. Therefore, it is an ideal solution for both individual and collaborative work.
Organisational benefits
Organisations find Mahara to be a valuable asset for their learning and teaching strategy. It is an easy-to-use platform to support and showcase learning. Additionally, Mahara can be customised to suit your organisation's specific needs and branding requirements. With Mahara, you can create templates for learners and align portfolios with your learning outcomes. Plus, integration with your learning management system (LMS) and other tools is seamless by using the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard. That means you can create a unified learning ecosystem.
More than 'just a portfolio'
Mahara is a feature-rich platform that beyond the basics. It offers a wide array of tools and capabilities, including:
1. Portfolio customisation
You have complete control over which items and information within your portfolio are visible to others. Mahara's intuitive system allows you to bundle artefacts or learning evidence onto pages. You can create portfolios that consist of one page or organise your learning evidence in collections that consist of multiple pages.
2. Progress tracking
Mahara has tools to map learning evidence to competencies and learning outcomes. For example, an administrator can set up competency frameworks that learners can then use to visually map their progress through its completion. Another tool offers a simple visual checklist around the completion of the portfolio. The outcomes tool can be used to collaboratively edit portfolios and closely track the completion of outcomes by a learner.
3. Journals and blogs
Mahara includes a comprehensive journaling tool. This gives learners the chance to reflect on their learning continually and embed journal posts into their portfolios.
4. Résumé builder
The portfolio platform offers a résumé builder, enabling portfolio authors to create digital résumés showcasing their employment and education histories, certifications, awards, skills, and goals. Then, they can add them to their portfolios with one click,
6. Reporting
Mahara comes equipped with a built-in reporting engine that collects valuable data. That means it can help drive learning analytics. Reports are available to track individuals but also to provide data aggregated data across groups of people.
7. LTI support
Mahara offers frictionless integration with Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI). So, it makes it easy to connect with various learning management systems, for example, Moodle.
8. Administration and customisation
Administrators have the ability to customise Mahara according to their institution's needs. Options include translations of the interface, themes, plugins, authentication methods, and even the ability to configure multiple organisations on a single Mahara instance.
9. Privacy and security
Mahara prioritises privacy and security, with features designed to support:
- GDPR compliance.
- Secure session key handling.
- Database and input validation to prevent attacks.
Additionally, account authentication can be linked to external systems, further enhancing security.
10. Scalability
The Mahara platform has been thoughtfully designed to scale, allowing for separate hardware for search, database, file storage, and web servers. This enables load balancing and ensures consistent performance as the system grows.
Is Mahara open source?
Mahara's open source nature offers a plethora of advantages to administrators, learning designers, and IT professionals in education and workplaces:
- Flexibility and customisation: Organisations have the freedom to tailor the platform precisely to their needs.
- Subscription-based model: Mahara operates on a subscription model, granting organisations and individual contributors access to the latest updates, security patches, and annual upgrades This model offers the flexibility to align your organisation's investment needs precisely. There are no vendor lock-in fees, and you can enjoy the peace of mind that comes with long-term platform support.
- Community collaboration: The global Mahara community plays an active role in enhancing the platform. It constantly contributes new feature requests to Catalyst IT, the core maintainer for global release. This ensures Mahara remains secure, up-to-date, and feature-rich, catering to diverse portfolio requirements.
- Transparency and security: The code is open source and can be inspected, allowing organisations to perform their own code service providers and security reviews, fostering trust in the platform to know what happens with the data that learners enter.
- Vendor independence: As an organisation, you are free to select a service providers or self-host your Mahara instance. This freedom gives you greater control over your technology investment, allowing you to choose between fully hosting your platform yourself or outsourcing managed services.
- Innovation and adaptability: Open source empowers rapid adaptation to evolving educational needs and emerging technologies. Mahara stands as a strategic option for those focused on supporting their learners' immediate goals while remaining agile for future learning economies. Catalyst IT offers full training and support packages to help you maximise your use of Mahara to achieve your educational goals.
- Ownership of data: Mahara caters to various global and local regulations as standard. It aligns with GDPR requirements, employs secure session key handling, and enforces database and input validation to mitigate security threats. Portfolio authors retain full control over their data. And, for those in New Zealand and some Australian states, Catalyst Cloud offers an option to host your Mahara instance, ensuring data sovereignty.
Is Mahara right for you?
Mahara is more than just a portfolio platform—it's a comprehensive solution for learners, educators, and professionals. With features like flexible portfolio creation, SmartEvidence, journalling, reporting, and more, it offers a holistic platform for documenting and showcasing learning. Mahara is a reliable choice for educational institutions and organisations worldwide.
Specifically for Aotearoa New Zealand, Catalyst IT operates two sites that clients can join for cost sharing:
- Kōpaki Tiaki Hauora Healthcare Portfolio for healthcare services providers
- MyPortfolio Schools for schools (free) and organisations supporting schools and their work.
Want to learn more about Mahara and portfolios?
To explore and learn more about Mahara:
- Visit the Mahara website website.
- Subscribe to the monthly Mahara newsletter from Catalyst IT.
- Tune in to the ‘Create. Share. Engage.’ podcast to discover interviews with portfolio practitioners, researchers, learning designers, students, and others from around the world.
How Mahara started
First established in mid-2006, the Mahara project started as a collaborative venture funded by New Zealand's Tertiary Education Commission's e-learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF) which was a contestable funding pool. Massey University led the project with collaborative partners, Auckland University of Technology, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, and Victoria University of Wellington. Each organisation had representation on the project Steering Group and this team included Richard Wyles from Flexible Learning Network who was leading aligned projects with Moodle on behalf of an Open Polytechnic led consortium, and further open source work with the Fedora repository system. Polytechnic-led In July 2007, Flexible Learning and Catalyst IT started collectively managing and supporting the project with their own time and resources plus further support from New Zealand’s Ministry of Education for a national ePortfolio service for schools (see MyPortfolio). A significant redevelopment of the views framework was made possible from Mellon Foundation funds from the Open Polytechnic’s winning a 2007 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration.
Today, Catalyst IT remains the core maintainer for Mahara and has committed to delivering long-term platform success through security and feature releases