Mahara

Mahara is an open source ePortfolio and social networking web application created by the government of New Zealand. It provides users with tools to create and maintain a digital portfolio of their learning, and social networking features to allow users to interact with each other. Mahara provides users with blogs, a resume builder, a file manager and a view creator - a tool to help users create arrangements of their content in a particular way for others to see. Mahara is a system in which students can record evidences of lifelong learning - such as essays, artwork or other such things they produce that can be stored digitally. Such things are known as artefacts in Mahara. But Mahara is much more than just a place to store files. Mahara also includes blogging, a resume builder, Moodle integration and the standout views framework. With Mahara, the user controls which items and what information (i.e. artefacts) within her/his portfolio other users see. To facilitate this access control, all artefacts the user wishes to show to other users need to be arranged into one area. In Mahara this compilation of selected artefacts is called a View. Users can have as many Views as they like, each with a different collection of artefacts, and intended purpose and audience. The audience, or the people the user wishes to give access to her/his View, can be added as individuals or as a member of a Group. It can even be made publicly available. For example it is possible to create a View for friends and family that includes holiday photos and a personal Blog. Or it could be created another View for the tutor, which includes assessments and reflective learning journal. A third View can be used to showcase the best pieces of work and the resume for potential employers. In fact the user can create as many Views as her/his wishes for work, study and leisure purposes. If we think of LMSes such as Moodle as the formal, structured side of e-learning, then Mahara is the social, reflective side. An LMS and an e-portfolio complement one another in an online learning environment. In particular, while Mahara's APIs are open to all, Mahara can integrate with Moodle to provide a streamlined user experience. The NEXT-TELL Mahara is already integrated with Moodle via single sign- on. Since Mahara has been designed from the ground up to be an open, pluggable system, NEXT-TELL Mahara will be integrated with other systems which will be used to provide evidence of and track learning activities of the user. In particular, the integration with Moodle will be extended to allow the user to record in a log file her/his activities within Moodle such followed courses, time spent on a course, how many times a course has been opened etc. Similarly, the NEXT-TELL Mahara will be extended to be integrated with other tools which are meant to track the learning activities and progresses of the learner. This is the case of the integration with Web-tracking tools (like Eyebrowse) which record the web activities (visited web sites, time spent on a page etc.) in a log file inside the p. 21 Reimann et al., 2011Reimann, P., Sircar, R., Giorgini, F., Meissl-Egghart, G., Kickmeier-Rust, M., Kossowski, M., Utz, W., & Halb, W. (2011). Training Concept. NEXT-TELL.