After recently attending the Moodle and Turnitin conferences, I turned my attention to our sometimes overlooked, yet equally important, cousin – Mahara, which is the platform for QMplus Hub. The Mahara Hui conference appealed to me as I had not had as much involvement with Mahara as I’ve had with our OLE, plugins and other web applications, and wanted to further my understanding of it’s capabilities.

My initial impression is that Mahara users are somewhat less demanding than those of Turnitin and Moodle, from the feedback I heard, with the majority of customers reasonably satisfied with the recent developments and current roadmap for the future. User engagement appears to be an area which needs improving however and this was voiced through the discussion groups and presentations. Mahara was compared with Social Media platforms and in doing so, users outlined functionality which was available elsewhere which needed to be implemented in order for users to further engage with the e-portfolio platform.

The event was a useful means for users to develop ideas, such as funding for further development of the service and to see how other HE institutions had overcome common problems. One development which caught my eye, which they hope to have ready for April next year, was that of a SmartEvidence plugin. This e-portfolio tool provides a standards framework against which evidence of the standards being met is mapped against, in an intuitive, time-efficient way. I can see this being a really useful tool for academics. 

Mahara 15.10 contains some very useful developments, such as site statistics, reports for the past month and up to 2 years, personalising one’s own theme (using CSS / sass & gulp), with Mahara 16.04, due in April next year, aiming to accomplish more:

• Ability to implement one page in several locations
• Combining pages/collections
• Revamping the navigation of Mahara
• Mobile friendly media player
• Style guide
• Open badge support (connecting via Mozilla Backpack)
• SmartEvidence
• Mahara droid compatibility
• CSS exports for html

With bug fixes resolving the issues which prevented us from upgrading to Mahara 15.10 this year, I am looking forward excitedly to seeing these developments shortly.