What is Mahara?

Mahara is a personal online ePortfolio platform that stays with you for the duration of your time at Flinders.

At Flinders University, we use Mahara to build ePortfolios.

An ePortfolio is a type of website. It's a combination of a resume, blog and social network, that both staff and students can use to communicate and showcase their skills and experiences, and reflect on their learning.

ePortfolios contain artefacts and reflections.

Artefacts are the documents and media you include in an ePortfolio and act as evidence of your learning. Examples of artefacts include essays, videos, lab reports, lesson plans, pictures, and certificates.

ePortfolios can also include reflections, which you use to add meaning to your artefacts. Reflective writing allows you to provide contextual and background information. For example, you can reflect on when and why you created an artefact. Reflective writing also allows you to make connections between your classes and co-curricular experiences to tell one cohesive story, e.g. connecting your studies before and after a placement.

With reflective writing, you can explain the significance of an experience or artefact. You and your peers may have similar experiences or artefacts, but what you learned, why it's important, and how you plan to apply that knowledge will be different for everyone. And that's the power of reflective writing.

You can use your Mahara space for anything you like - personal notes, professional activity, scholarly activity, and research, continuing professional development, career building and job-seeking, etc. Mahara works well to capture your experiential and informal learning, and can also be used for formal coursework. It can be a lot of things, but essentially, Mahara is a place to tell a story.

What can you do in Mahara?

Not sure where to start?
The best way to understand what Mahara makes possible is to use it yourself. Have something concrete and genuinely useful in mind, even if you are just replicating your resume!

Consider possible applications:

A place to collect things: Upload, tag, and store files you have created, or hyperlink to larger media files. You can also export forum posts, glossary entries and other items from your topic into your Mahara space.
A place to capture your thoughts on the go: Journal your experiences, reflect, plan, make personal notes.
A place to collaborate with others: A controlled space for sharing and co-creating in groups.
A way to present to others: Creatively combine text and media into pages and collections, and share these for assessment, promotion, or job-seeking.
A conversational space: Connect your big ideas to the world and invite public comment.

You can think of the ePortfolio as a practice as well as a technology. It is a way of engaging with your work and with others. In the following video, Nicola Parkin draws from her own experience as a seasoned user of Mahara to explain the idea:

Use Mahara to demonstrate Mahara

If you are planning to use Mahara in your topic or course, go through the activity yourself first. This will:

Generate ideas on how the tool might be used to support learning and assessment.
Provide insight into the user experience.
Test the steps so that you can provide accurate instructions (write them down as you go)
Create an example for sharing with students so they can 'see what you mean’.

View some example ePortfolios:

Lauryn's portfolio: Lauryn, a Science student, discusses her newfound survey, scheduling, spreadsheet, and speaking skills, earned through working at her University.
Stephen’s portfolio: Stephen reflects on the Don’t Say Gay Bill, connecting his interpretation to theory and an action plan – the Say Gay Tarot cards – that wove queerness and identity with culture, race and privilege.
Serhat's portfolio: Serhat's record of learning from his Master of Distance Education at Athabasca University. An exemplar showcase of coursework.
An MD student's portfolio: The student kept a journal with each entry tagged with one of MD course learning outcomes (CLO). The student then set up a collection of pages that automatically collated the journal entries for each CLO. The student shared the entries with their learning coach, who can see a curated story about their development in each CLO.
Chris's portfolio: A previous staff member's portfolio created for Flinders Foundation of University Teaching (FFOUT) professional development.
Michael's academic professional portfolio: a great example of an extensive, lovingly maintained, and rich portfolio.

Using Mahara

Overview

How to access
Mahara dashboard
Navigation menus
Strategies to support students to use Mahara

Creating content

Creating and marking assignments

Manage your account

How do I create and share a Mahara template with students?
How do I share my Mahara content with others?
I’ve reached my Mahara storage quota. What can I do?
How do I change my email notifications in Mahara?
How do I export my Mahara content?
How do I customise my profile page?
What happens to my Mahara content when I leave Flinders?