E-Portfolios for students and staff

E-Portfolios are now ready for anyone in the Polytechnic who wants to use them - staff, classes, groups, individual students... As described before we are using Mahara to provide this service. We have two hosted services arising from different pilot projects in 2009 - one is just Mahara and the other is an integrated Mahara + Moodle installation.

Teacher and user guides (video and text) are available and a community of practice has been established across all campuses. It will be interesting to see how many staff and students decide to use E-Portfolios who were not part of previous projects.

Problems encountered during the 2009 projects will hopefully be addressed with recent changes such as

• upgrading Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8
  
• upgrading Mahara to allow for importing and exporting
  
• customised help

Mahara isn't the only solution for E-Portfolios. Some staff and students choose to use

• blogs with embedded code from other sites where they save work or links to online file storage
• wikis or services such as Google docs and sites
• Deviant Art or similar shared galleries
• Flickr, Picassa or similar photo albums
• Facebook or MySpace for student or whole class folios or online presence with rich media
  

A survey of staff at the end of 2009 revealed that 40% were exploring so-called web 2.0 or social media sites for use with students. The attraction of Mahara is that it provides some social media functionality within a local learning environment while still providing student control of access to work including external access via a 'secret' URL.

Students can connect with and share work with classmates or friends as well as teachers and feedback from students in the 2009 projects indicated that this was highly valued.