Mahara Upgrade

Mahara is the University’s e-Portfolio system. It can be accessed directly from Moodle, by clicking on explore > e-Portfolio, or by typing this address into your web-browser: http://eportfolio.yorksj.ac.uk

On Tuesday 21st January we will be upgrading from Mahara 1.4 to Mahara 1.8, a change which will ensure performance and stability for the future, and which will include a host of new features.

There will be quite a few changes, given that we are upgrading by 4 versions, as well as some great new features, including:

• New Moodle Assignment plugin which will allow students to submit e-Portfolio pages for assessment
• The block chooser now appears vertically and scrolls down the page, to accomodate longer Pages
• Page layouts can now have rows as well as columns
• The PDF block allows PDFs to be viewed inline (embedded) in a Page
• Notes (and text box blocks) can have attachments
• You can drag-and-drop to upload files
• Page skins allow individual users the ability to change the design of their Pages
• A new ‘responsive theme’, designed to work fluidly on many screen sizes; especially mobile devices
• The option for images to be resized at upload time
• The ability to add journal entries directly from a page
• Collections can be submitted to groups
• Reusable text boxes, a.k.a. ‘Notes’
• Image gallery displays external galleries (flickr, Panoramio, Photobucket, Picasa, Windows Live)
• Support for embedding content from Glogster, Prezi, Slideshare, Vimeo, Voki and WikiEducator
• The ability to copy collections
• Multiple file uploads

More information about Mahara can be found on the TEL website.

Staff can contact the TEL team for more information (tel@yorksj.ac.uk) and students looking for help can contact Annette Webb (Student Academic Technologies Trainer).

Phil