Background

Discover how Griffith College in Ireland used Mahara to create a more connected and reflective learning experience for students and mentors.
Griffith College in Dublin, Ireland, offers a range of national degree apprenticeship programmes, including a two-year Advanced Healthcare Assistant Practitioner apprenticeship (NFQ level 6) and a three-year Bar Manager apprenticeship (NFQ level 7).
Jonathan Murphy, Head of the Apprenticeship Department, is responsible for overseeing these programmes. He encountered the challenge of integrating academic learning with practical workplace experiential learning. Griffith College required a system to enable students, mentors, and educators to track progress and ensure programme learning outcomes are met.
Degree apprenticeships weave together academic and workplace learning to take advantage of the best of both worlds, commonly known as work-integrated learning (WIL). Griffith College required a technical solution to integrate mentor feedback into the learning process, while the workplace mentors remained separate from the college system.
While working to identify a solution, Jonathan discovered that ePortfolios offered a paperless, structured way to track and showcase work, enabling students to demonstrate their skills and mentors to provide timely feedback.
“The pedagogy of portfolios is really good... it was giving me the functionality I needed."
- Jonathan Murphy, Head of the Apprenticeship Department
Jonathan worked closely with his team to create tailored ePortfolio templates using Mahara to support each degree apprenticeship’s needs. With a focus on hands-on learning in fields as diverse as bar management and healthcare, Jonathan’s work has ensured that the degree apprentices gain academic knowledge and develop practical skills in their industries, reflecting on their experience.
Jonathan and his team created structured ePortfolios for each degree apprenticeship, enabling students to populate them with evidence from their workplace. These templates offer a range of benefits:
The degree apprenticeships include competency-based assessments. Griffith College uses the SmartEvidence feature in Mahara to structure competencies within a portfolio, facilitating the mapping of portfolio content to selected competencies. To help track this progress against specific learning outcomes, Griffith College set up a competency framework in SmartEvidence for each programme to offer these specific frameworks to students to use as focused guides for their workplace learning. A SmartEvidence framework is then added to the portfolio template for easy access.
Griffith College’s degree apprenticeship programmes have seen significant improvements since the introduction of ePortfolios:
“By the end of the programme, the difference in students’ skills and confidence is amazing. The portfolios really help them see their growth.”
- Jonathan Murphy, Head of the Apprenticeship Department
Griffith College has made degree apprenticeship programmes more efficient, straightforward and engaging for students, mentors, and educators by integrating academic programmes with work-integrated learning using ePortfolios. The structured yet flexible approach empowers students to showcase their skills while mentors and educators can offer timely, regular and goal-focused feedback. Jonathan shares, "I would love to expand the use of Mahara in Griffith College" to bring portfolio practice to even more learning and professional development areas.
Learn more about how Griffith College used Mahara to grow its students' skills and confidence by listening to Jonathan's episode on our podcast 'Create. Share. Engage.'
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Catalyst is the core maintainer of Mahara, and our team has many years of experience with digital portfolios. Whether you're new to portfolios or want to enhance your learning and professional development strategy with more reflective practices, we're happy to help. Contact us for Mahara and portfolio support.