Forums | E-Learning Practitioners

31 January 2014, 15:27

Hello everyone

I thought I'd share with you some news about the Groups & Portfolios area (Mahara)

Over the last few months the amount of activity taking place in this part of QMplus has grown substantially, in fact there are now 37,441 pages in the system..with the average number of pages per user sitting at about 2.1. There have been a number of initiatives launched and enquiries received both at module and programme level including a pilot 'Academic Portfolio' due to launch mid to late February at the Institute of Dentistry.

As of today there is a new page within our 'Help area for students' which contains 35 short screencasts demonstrating how to use the tools within Groups and Portfolios (mahara) to build a portfolio, share your content on pages and make them accessible to groups, friends tutors etc. I hope your students (and yourselves!) will find these useful.

QMplus Groups & Portfolios student help: http://qmplus.qmul.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=4366

We had planned to upgrade our Mahara installation last Tuesday from version 1.5.1 to version 1.7.3. Unfortunately we were not able to do so as parts of the theme were not rendering well. We have now scheduled a new upgrade date:  Tuesday 18 February. We would expect that the Groups & Portfolios area will be unavailable from 7am - lunchtime on that day.

The new version of Mahara will deliver some significant enhancements to the functionality. Whilst there are many small improvements behind the scenes to performance, security etc, the main enhancements for us as educators are:

Pages & Blocks

-          Options for images to be resized at upload time

-          ability to add journal entries directly from a portfolio page where it is embedded (i.e. no need to go back to the journal itself )

-          Retractable blocks – i.e. you can show and hide the artefacts you place on a page therefore reducing scroll etc in long portfolios  (this is an optional selection on every artefact)

-          Ability to add license metadata to individual artefacts

-          Display up to 10 collections per page

Copying and sharing

-          Collections can be submitted to groups

-          ‘Shared pages’ – currently under the ‘Groups’ tab moves to the ‘Portfolio’ tab and is renamed ‘Shared with me’

-          The existing ‘Share’ under the ‘Portfolio’ tab is renamed  ‘Shared by me’

Usability

-          A New ‘unpublish’ button for journal entries

Groups

-          Collections available for groups

-          Group admins can enable and view participation reports within groups

-          Editability of content can be limited with a start and end time

-          Pagination for forum topics

-          Search only for groups you can join

-          Display up to 100 members on the group homepage

All the best

Brett Lucas

E-Learning Unit