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April 22, 2025 • 17 mins

In this episode, podcast host Kristina Hoeppner, MA, who is the Mahara Project Lead and Product Manager, shares how a feature makes into the application, using a couple of recent examples from Mahara 25.04 that will be released by the end of April 2025.

Mahara 25.04 will have a number of great new features available that enhance portfolio practice and also help teaching and support staff in their roles.

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Production information
Production: Catalyst IT
Host: Kristina Hoeppner
Artwork: Evonne Cheung
Music: The Mahara tune by Josh Woodward

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
Welcome to 'Create. Share.
Engage.' This is the podcastabout portfolios for learning
and more for educators, learningdesigners, and managers keen on
integrating portfolios withtheir education and professional
development practices. 'Create.
Share. Engage.' is brought toyou by the Mahara team at

(00:25):
Catalyst IT. My name is KristinaHoeppner. Today's episode does
not feature a portfoliocommunity member. Instead, what
I wanted to do is a bit of abehind the scenes episode so you
can learn how an idea makes itinto a finished feature in
Mahara. I'll also talk aboutsome of the feature highlights
that you can expect in this newrelease that improve how Mahara

(00:49):
can be used in your portfoliopractice and also managed
efficiently at yourorganisation.
We will release Mahara 25.04 bythe end of April, so just within
the week of go live of thisepisode. The first number, 25,
stands for the year in whichthis version is released: 2025.

(01:10):
The second number, 04, marks therelease month, which is April.
That makes it easy to rememberhow old a particular version of
Mahara is.
Our Catalyst team in AotearoaNew Zealand has been working on
this release for the past year.
We collaborated with our clientson a number of features using
input from our conversationswith community members for other

(01:32):
changes. We have also receivedcontributions from the community
that made it into this latestversion of Mahara. We are always
grateful for thesecontributions. They give us
insight into how organisationsuse Mahara and how it works
better for them with the changesthat they have made.

(01:53):
Since Mahara is an open sourceproject, every organisation can
make the changes they see fit totailor the application to their
own needs through either smallchanges, like adjustments of the
words used in Mahara, to fullcustom code development. When
these changes then are sharedback to the upstream Mahara
product, they will be availablefor others as well who may want

(02:17):
to use these improvementsthemselves and may even be
developed further by them. Wehave seen that over the years
when one organisation had anidea and made a first
implementation of a feature.
Then another organisation likedthat feature but thought that
something was still missing andthen contributed that feature,
which then in turn was used bythe first organisation as well.

(02:41):
So how do ideas make it intoMahara? It all starts with a
conversation. That can be anactual chat or meeting or also a
virtual conversation in ourcommunity forums or issue and
enhancement tracker to which keystaff from organisations that
have a subscription for Maharahave access. In the

(03:01):
conversation, the big questionis 'Why?' Why would the idea be
beneficial for learners, staff,or administrators to have in
Mahara? Figuring out the goal iscrucial to determine whether the
idea is something to pursuefurther. Ideas for changes in
Mahara are often the result ofmissing functionality or

(03:22):
workflow improvements to make iteasier to do a particular task.
This can then be anything fromworking with portfolios to how
teaching staff interact with aplatform to functionality that
makes the life of support staffeasier.
Let me give you an example fromMahara 25.04. In Aotearoa, we

(03:43):
have Healthcare Portfolio, whichis a Mahara site that is used by
nurses from several of ourhealth districts for their
Professional Development andRecognition Programme, short
PDRP. Several years ago, wedeveloped the peer assessment
functionality with their inputto make it easy for peer
assessors to comment in certainplaces directly in the

(04:07):
portfolio, rather than in thegeneral comment section at the
bottom of the page. This hasbeen working pretty well for
them because it allowed peers tohave their specific instructions
for each area that requiredtheir assessment.
The nurses also need to do aself assessment for each
competency. So far, they haveused regular 'Text' blocks for

(04:30):
that. However, when it comes tothe final assessment, they
sometimes need to add moredetails to their reflections.
But these additions are nottracked, making it more
difficult for an assessor to seewhat changes the nurse has made
after their conversation. Thisissue doesn't happen with a peer

(04:50):
assessment because there acomment cannot be changed once
it has been published. Instead,additional comments can be
added. That then resulted in theidea to make the peer assessment
functionality available also forportfolio authors because it is
a concept that they are alreadyused to, and it allows the
assessors to see additionaldetails easily since they are

(05:13):
tracked as further comments andhave a date on them.
In this case, the solutiondesign phase was pretty short
because it was very clear whatchange was to be made in Mahara.
At other times, the solutiondesign phase can take several
days and involve a number ofpeople to gather all the
requirements to fully understandwhat the goal is and then come

(05:37):
up with the idea how it can beimplemented in Mahara. This
solution design phase is crucialso everyone is on the same page
for what the functionality willlook like in the end. We often
work with wireframes or mock-upsto illustrate the functionality
to our clients so they canvisualise it better. This also

(05:57):
helps our developers, who knowhow to code, for example, a
drop-down menu when they seeone, because they have
established guidelines for that.
Have you ever seen the treeswing cartoon that depicts a
swing in the tree in a number ofdifferent iterations? Each panel
of the cartoon states how aperson or how a particular role

(06:20):
in the a project team imaginedthe swing to look like. But
actually, none of them give theclient what they wanted due to
miscommunication. For example,one person explained it as three
boards stacked on top of eachother. Another understood it to
be a simple plank on a rope. Yetanother imagined an armchair
hanging from the tree branch andso on. But what the client

(06:43):
wanted was a tire on a ropehanging off a sturdy tree
branch. I put a link to a coupleof online resources into the
episode notes, where you can seethe cartoon and also read up on
its fascinating history, whichwas traced back all the way to
1973.
I find it's a greatvisualisation to illustrate the

(07:05):
importance of requirementsgathering and bringing everyone
onto the same page. Since noteverybody understands technical
explanations, we find the bestis to work with wireframes or
mock-ups with our clients toshow them what the finished
functionality would look like asthat is how they usually
interact with Mahara. They thentrust us that the code on the

(07:28):
back-end supports thatfunctionality and is built in a
way that uses existing designelements to fit into Mahara and
is also maintainable.
But now back to our assessmentfunctionality. Once we confirmed
the requirements with ourclients and received their
sign-off, a developer took onthe task of making the necessary

(07:49):
changes. They expanded theexisting peer assessment feature
to also allow for selfassessments. A list of detailed
changes and new requirementshelped during the development
process. Then came the peerreview process in which,
typically, two other teammembers are involved. Another
developer reviewed the codebased on our coding guidelines

(08:12):
to check that there are nomistakes. Someone else then
performed the manual testing toensure that all requirements
were implemented as intended.
When issues were found, thedeveloper fixed them, and the
peer review process went intoanother round. After this
internal review process, we madethe functionality available to
our clients for their owntesting before it was rolled out

(08:34):
on the live site. Once it wasall signed off, we also merged
the code into Mahara because wesaw the usefulness of this
functionality for otherorganisations. Switching between
peer and self assessment is nowan option in the block
configuration in Mahara 25.04.

(08:54):
Let me give you another example.
One of my colleagues inAustralia implemented a feature
that I'm excited about, and thatfeature is for Monash
University, who started usingMahara more widely last year.
Before then, students in theFaculty of Arts and in the
Faculty of InformationTechnology had created
portfolios in Mahara on theirown instances. But in 2024

(09:15):
Mahara became available to morefaculties. It's been exciting to
follow this process fairlyclosely. Portfolios play an
increasingly important role atthe university with the move to
more and more programmaticassessment. Portfolios are well
positioned to support thatmovement as they help with the

(09:38):
personalisation of the learningexperience and also formative
assessment option amongstothers.
What did we do for MonashUniversity? We improved the
continuing professionaldevelopment, abbreviated as CPD,
functionality within Mahara by along stretch. Originally, CPD

(09:59):
was a plugin that James Kerrigandeveloped for Mahara 1.3. That
was back in 2012. Geoff Rowlandthen maintained it for a number
of years. James was a student onthe Foundation degree in
Computing and InternetTechnology at the University
Centre Yeovil. The plugin wasbuilt on top of the 'Plans'
functionality and allowedstudents to keep a tally of the

(10:22):
number of hours they had spenton the activities that they
logged. We often used thisplugin for our own clients and
then pretty much maintained itonce Geoff retired. That's why
we decided last year to merge itinto Mahara core itself to make
it more readily available toeverybody and also easier to
maintain for us. Some of thatwork was sponsored by some of

(10:44):
our clients who make heavy useof this feature.
The university wanted to providestudents more guidance in terms
of what types of CPD activitieswould count towards the total
number of hours, and make iteasier for them to see their
progress. Because the change wasmuch bigger than the one for the

(11:05):
peer assessment, we had severalmeetings and also mock-ups
before we settled on theadditions. It was also important
that the additions were flexibleenough to accommodate CPD
requirements of different studyprogrammes. That is also always
something we take into accountwhen a functionality is
considered for Mahara itself.
Would this be useful for others?

(11:29):
And if so, should there be aconfiguration option available?
Sometimes the configuration isquite minimal because we do need
to stick to the scope that weagreed on and also to the budget
that is available. For the CPDchanges, we already know that
some additions would bewelcomed, and thus, the changes

(11:49):
that made it into Mahara 25.04are a first iteration.
We rolled out this functionalityto the university's Mahara site
directly upon completion of thetesting, and students can now
see all their logged hours fordifferent categories within
their overall CPD experience andhave graphs available that

(12:10):
quickly show them how much theyhave already achieved in the
different categories that theyneed to track. Our clients do
not need to wait for a newversion of Mahara to be released
in order to use new features. Inmost cases, new features can be
back ported to a recent versionof Mahara and thus be available
quickly without depending on ourrelease cycle.

(12:33):
The assessment block and alsothe CPD enhancements are
examples of fairly small andlarger changes to Mahara that
are a result of conversationswith our clients and also
knowing how other communitymembers are using Mahara. The
more we know how you arecurrently using Mahara within
your organisation, the better anidea we have what features are

(12:56):
used more often and where weshould be spending our time on
for improvements.
Last year, for example, weconducted a usability review of
Mahara that encompassed a reviewof the information architecture
of the platform, as well asinterviews with community
members, from students tolecturers, learning designers,

(13:17):
and also support staff so thatwe could gain more insight into
what works well for them andwhere they are problems that we
should resolve. All of thatcombined resulted in our
proposal for a Mahara refresh.
We shared the main wireframesfor that and also recently a
video showcasing some of themain screens as mock-ups from a

(13:38):
design perspective. The episodenotes have the links to these
videos if you haven't seen them.
You can also already see a fewchanges to support this refresh
in our 25.04 release. Forexample, we have a new icon set,
combined the 'Image' and'Gallery' blocks, and made a few

(14:00):
other improvements as a resultof this usability review that
support our work on our roadmap.
The bigger changes, we plan torelease those in April 2026. If
you want to be involved intesting any of these changes
during the development process,please do get in touch with me.

(14:21):
Contributors to the Maharaproject are not only developers,
but also people doing thebusiness analysis, usability and
accessibility reviews andimprovements, graphic design,
and general testing. Othercommunity members translate
Mahara into a range oflanguages, report issues and
feature ideas, and providesupport in our community forums.

(14:45):
All of these community membersand a few other roles that I
haven't mentioned herecontribute to the success of the
project.
Now, if you want to give Mahara25.04 a go, you can do so right
now. You can set up an accounton our development instance and
get started. If you want to testsome of the administrator

(15:06):
features, please let me know soI can change your permissions on
the site. Also, if yourorganisation has its own testing
site, you can install the 25.04code and test it with your own
data. More information on howyou can access the code is
available in the announcement ofthe preview version. Do you have

(15:27):
an idea for a new feature or anenhancement? Share it either in
a forum post or on ourenhancement tracker. If our
tracker already contains animprovement that you would like
to see in Mahara, add yourthoughts to it and give it a
thumbs up, so we know moreconcretely that the feature
would benefit others.

(15:49):
And so this is it for thisepisode of 'Create. Share.
Engage.' in which I shared howan idea makes it into Mahara and
what some of the new featuresare in Mahara 25.04. I look
forward to seeing you at one ofour future events. Besides
webinars and community organisedevents, we also have monthly

(16:12):
'Ask Me Anything' sessions towhich you can drop in and ask
your Mahara questions. See youthen.
This was 'Create. Share.
Engage.' today, just with me,your host, Kristina Hoeppner,
Project Lead and Product Managerof the portfolio platform
Mahara. Head to our websitepodcast.mahara.org where you can

(16:34):
find resources and thetranscript for this episode.
This podcast is produced byCatalyst IT. Our next episode
will air in two weeks. I hopeyou will listen again and tell a
colleague about our podcast sothey can subscribe. Until then,
create, share, and engage.
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