When learners reflect on how they learn and what they’re learning, they’re deepening their understanding of concepts and knowledge. By using portfolios, they can enrich their learning journey with a personal hub, to create, share, and engage with their work and thoughts. If you’re new to portfolios or if you’re considering which portfolio platform to use, below are seven reasons why you should choose Mahara.
7 reasons to use Mahara
Scattered notebooks with loosely collected notes are a thing of the past. These days, using a solution like Mahara(external link) can streamline your learners’ education experience and it’s designed to put learners at the centre of their portfolio experience. Plus, you can integrate it with your learning management system (LMS)(external link).
1. Create personal learning hubs
Mahara gives administrators the flexibility to create templates for assessment, accreditation, or work-integrated learning. Learners can leverage these templates to structure the collection of evidence of their learning experience and reflect on it. While templates are often a good starting point to scaffold a portfolio activity, learners also still have the freedom to use portfolios in their own way. For example, they can write journal entries, record videos, and plan their work. Plus, the Mahara mobile app makes collecting work products and reflecting in journal entries without internet access a breeze.
At University College London (ULC), for example, Professor Dr Cathy Elliott loves how Mahara gives her students the freedom of learning in a way that works for them. Listen to Cathy talk about creating flexible and fun learning experiences(external link) for her political science students.
2. Promote self-reflection and personal growth
Through building the practice of reflection, learners can understand their strengths and challenges, and achievements. They can also identify more connections between different learning areas. Mahara gives them a space to do exactly this and they can choose to keep it private or share it with others. Having a space like this empowers them to:
- understand themselves better by understanding how they think and learn
- develop an emotional connection to their work and a sense of pride for what they’re working on
- deepen their learning through intentionally creating, sharing, and engaging with their learning
- reflect on their motivations and practice positive beliefs around achieving their goals.
Self reflection doesn’t always come naturally. That’s why the flexible templates we noted in point one can help build a scaffolded approach to gaining this skill. Learn more about why reflective learning is important in our ‘Guide to ePortfolios(external link)' blog post.
3. Demonstrate skills and achievements
A digital portfolio eliminates the stress of tracking down records, transcripts, or exam results and stores them in one place. No matter if your learners are trying to demonstrate a new skill or competency or highlight an accomplishment, Mahara can capture the learning. Furthermore, when learners are ready to share these achievements they can easily do that via a curated collection.
A Mahara portfolio enables learners to visualise their learning. For example, rather than just placing words on a page, they can share presentations, images, and multimedia content, cultivating a true reflection of their skills alongside their CV.
Additionally, by using SmartEvidence in Mahara(external link), learners can map their portfolio evidence directly to a specific competency framework. This helps them to visually demonstrate how their work aligns with required skills or competencies. Discover how SmartEvidence helped AP Hogeschool Antwerpen(external link) to centralise and visualise all instructor, mentor, and learner assessments.
4. Support to safeguard data and ethics
Mahara gives learners complete control over their personal data—they decide what to share, with whom, and when. With secure logins and GDPR compliance(external link), Mahara ensures that both your learners' and your organisation’s data are protected.
You can also choose how to host your Mahara site: either self-host or partner with us for managed services(external link). Specifically, if you're in Aotearoa New Zealand, we can provide sovereign hosting solutions to keeping data in-country and ensuring compliance with NZ law.
Data privacy and digital ethics are intertwined and a hot topic for discussion between Kristina Hoeppner, Mahara project lead, and Dr Kevin Kelly (San Francisco State University) on the 'Think UDL' podcast. Listen to the ‘Digital Ethics in ePortfolios' episode(external link) to hear their insights.
5. Collaborate easily
Mahara makes it easy for learners to create portfolios collaboratively with peers and work together on group projects. There’s also discussion forums available to support social learning, and learners can reflect on their individual and group progress. Plus, Mahara pairs perfectly with LMSs like Moodle(external link), where learners can submit portfolios for assessments to keep track of assessments and get feedback.
6. Join the Mahara community
Mahara has a dedicated community of learning designers, educators, and researchers who share advice and practices which can serve as inspiration for others. These conversations contribute to the development of Mahara as our team builds features based on community feedback, so you get a say in the direction that Mahara takes. Plus, there are always opportunities to connect at online or in-person events(external link), such as the monthly 'Mahara – Ask Me Anything' sessions, locally organised Mahara Hui, and portfolio conferences.
You can also stay up to date with the latest in Mahara by:
- Listening to the ‘Create. Share. Engage,(external link)’ fortnightly podcast where members of the portfolio community share how they work with portfolios at their organisations
- Subscribing to the monthly Mahara newsletter(external link)
- Watching videos on the Mahara YouTube channel(external link)
- Joining the community of portfolio practitioners on the Mahara LinkedIn(external link) page.
7. Have Mahara your way
Mahara offers two subscription plans(external link) to choose from, with flexible pricing based on the number of people that are using your site within a year, which is handy for when you’re slowly scaling up the use of portfolios. The platform is vendor lock-in free, and it is published under the open source license GNU GPL v3(external link). That means that you can make changes to Mahara yourself or partner with us to create the functionality you are after.
When you choose one of the Mahara subscription plans, you get full access to the latest version of Mahara, including updates throughout the year. Plus, you can receive free support in our community forums. If you purchase an enterprise plan, you have access to a video library on Mahara features that are not available in the public Mahara manual(external link). Check out what's on the roadmap for the future, and what's already in the works.
If you need additional support, you can also contact our team to discuss your specific requirements(external link).
Choose Mahara to empower your learners for lifelong learning
Since 2006, Mahara has empowered hundreds of thousands of learners in countries all around the world to talk about and share their learning experiences. From tertiary institutions to workplace organisations, people are using Mahara to create, share, and engage with their learning. By providing a portfolio platform that puts learners at the heart of it all, they deepen their learning and become reflective practitioners.
Discover which Mahara subscription is best for your organisation.(external link)