Last month students were given the opportunity to show off their AMAZING Mahara pages in a Mahara competition run by the ILT team and in turn get the chance to win a £15 iTunes voucher for the best Mahara pages. Kelly Page, a final year foundation degree Animal Management student, won the competition with her fantastic Mahara collection on her work placement. The ILT team decided that Kelly was a worthy winner due to her making great use of many of Mahara's features including collections, layout, themes, uploading different media, journal features and more!
In this article you can read more about Mahara and what Kelly though about using Mahara for her student work.
Firstly, we should start off with answering the question what is Mahara? Many of you have heard of Moodle. But have you heard about Mahara?
Pictured Left: Kelly Page a final year foundation degree Animal Management student and winner of the Mahara competition at Sparsholt and Andover College; Right: screenshots of Kelly's amazing Mahara pages!
Mahara is an online application that allows you to build and continually develop your own ePortfolio. Your ePorfolio will take the form of a website and can be a single page or several pages. Currently Mahara is being used by some departments in HE and FE at Sparsholt and Andover College but the College is hoping that Mahara will be more widely used in the future.
To find out what students who are already using Mahara think, the ILT team interviewed Kelly Page and got her opinion on what she thought of Mahara, the colleges current support of her using the application and what could be done better next year...
What is the best thing about using Mahara for your college work?
It is a much easier and better way to present your work. If I had to put together and print off all that I had put on my Mahara pages on to paper, the presentation probably wouldn’t look as good as it did on the webpage. Also it would be a lot harder to print everything off and I think I can showcase my work so much better on Mahara. It will definitely be easier for all students once they get to know how to use it then it is definitely easier than printing.
What is your favourite feature of Mahara?
I quite like that fact that you can do tabs*. Because in my first year, when I used it for Academic skills, I didn’t know about creating tabs and I put everything all on one page. Comparing last years to this years it looks so much better with tabs and I think it looks much more professional too.
*Tabs are created at the top of Mahara pages when you group pages together and this allows you to easily navigate between the pages.
What have you found most difficult when using Mahara?
I, myself, didn’t really find anything difficult and I got used to it quite quickly. But thinking about other people and what other people said when we were going through the tutorials for it. A lot of people thought that the sessions were too quick and there wasn’t enough information being given to them. Then when they went to do their work, they were panicking because they hadn’t had much time with somebody to explain everything to them. So I think having the option of one to one sessions would make it a lot easier for some people.
What could the College do to make using Mahara better?
Definitely one to one sessions would be helpful because I remember in first year we were in such a big room and such a big group that if there were any questions it was hard because there was only one person talking about it and it was hard for her get around to everybody. This year we had another one that was a bit better because we were split into smaller groups but it was still quite rushed. I think video tutorials and examples of pages on the front of Mahara would definitely be helpful. The more people can see and watch with more information then it would be a lot easier for people to understand how to use it.
How can the College better promote Mahara?
Definitely showing a comparison of one piece of work on Mahara and a paper copy. Because I think that will show the amount of work it takes for the paper copy, especially in a big portfolio. Then show how you can present it across on Mahara, because with pictures and showing evidence on Mahara looks so much better on a webpage than it does on paper.
Would you recommend using Mahara to other students?
Yes, definitely!
The ILT team would like to thank Kelly for taking the time to talk to them and for giving them her honest opinion about using Mahara. From this interview with Kelly, and from discussions with staff and other students, the ILT team are going to create "how to Mahara" videos and exemplar pages that students have created on the Mahara dashboard ready for next year. In addition, the ILT team always look to keep group numbers down to a minimum when running tutorials on using Mahara, however this is subject to timetabling and IT room availability.
As always the ILT team is available for one to one sessions with students who are struggling with any of the learning technologies we have here at Sparsholt and Andover college. It is something that is communicated to to students in all training sessions with the team as well as on posters in all IT rooms. However, the team will look to emphasise this point more prominently in training session and send reminders via email and WAMedu to all students.
If students or staff wish to book a training session on using Mahara or other learning technologies then please don't hesitate to contact the ILT team on ILT_support@sparsholt.ac.uk
P.S. did you know this article was created in Mahara?