Mahara: What the &$%# is it?

Presented by Aaron Wells, Catalyst IT // 26th March 2015Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0

About Catalyst

Aaron Wells (Me)

@AaronTheMad

Mahara (My job)

@MaharaProject

Mahara: What the &$%# is it?

Mahara: the facts● An open-source ePortfolio for education● Born in NZ in 2006, for a consortium of NZ universities● Catalyst Mahara team is “Mahara HQ”

– Releases security updates

– Maintains most project infrastructure

● Significant code contributions from a global open source community

– Translated by the community into 30 languages

● 300 sites worldwide that volunteer usage data back to mahara.org

– With over 1 million users between them

.school.nz

What the &$%# is an ePortfolio?“Mahara is a fully featured web application to build your electronic portfolio. You can create journals, upload files, embed social media resources from the web and collaborate with other users in groups.”

My definition

ePortfolio: (noun) A multi-user content management system.

Mahara's features in outline

● Users create “Pages”, i.e. webpages● Managing, and creating the content that goes in those webpages

– Images

– Text

– Videos

– Blogs

– Etc...

● Pages can be grouped into “Collections”, i.e. mini-websites● Social network functionality to let users collaborate and share

content

What the &$%# is it good for?

The ePortfolio replaces the “snail-portfolio”

https://www.flickr.com/photos/madame_furie/2467902183

Your gateway to the magical world of getting involved with Mahara:

The Mahara community website:

https://mahara.org

Catalyst Clients

Open Source Technologies