Welcome to 'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios with their education and professional development practices. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner. Today's episode does not feature a portfolio community member. Instead, what I wanted to do is a bit of a behind the scenes episode so you can learn how an idea makes it into a finished feature in Mahara. I'll also talk about some of the feature highlights that you can expect in this new release that improve how Mahara can be used in your portfolio practice and also managed efficiently at your organisation. We will release Mahara 25.04 by the end of April, so just within the week of go live of this episode. The first number, 25, stands for the year in which this version is released: 2025. The second number, 04, marks the release month, which is April. That makes it easy to remember how old a particular version of Mahara is. Our Catalyst team in Aotearoa New Zealand has been working on this release for the past year. We collaborated with our clients on a number of features using input from our conversations with community members for other changes. We have also received contributions from the community that made it into this latest version of Mahara. We are always grateful for these contributions. They give us insight into how organisations use Mahara and how it works better for them with the changes that they have made. Since Mahara is an open source project, every organisation can make the changes they see fit to tailor the application to their own needs through either small changes, like adjustments of the words used in Mahara, to full custom code development. When these changes then are shared back to the upstream Mahara product, they will be available for others as well who may want to use these improvements themselves and may even be developed further by them. We have seen that over the years when one organisation had an idea and made a first implementation of a feature. Then another organisation liked that feature but thought that something was still missing and then contributed that feature, which then in turn was used by the first organisation as well. So how do ideas make it into Mahara? It all starts with a conversation. That can be an actual chat or meeting or also a virtual conversation in our community forums or issue and enhancement tracker to which key staff from organisations that have a subscription for Mahara have access. In the conversation, the big question is 'Why?' Why would the idea be beneficial for learners, staff, or administrators to have in Mahara? Figuring out the goal is crucial to determine whether the idea is something to pursue further. Ideas for changes in Mahara are often the result of missing functionality or workflow improvements to make it easier to do a particular task. This can then be anything from working with portfolios to how teaching staff interact with a platform to functionality that makes the life of support staff easier. Let me give you an example from Mahara 25.04. In Aotearoa, we have Healthcare Portfolio, which is a Mahara site that is used by nurses from several of our health districts for their Professional Development and Recognition Programme, short PDRP. Several years ago, we developed the peer assessment functionality with their input to make it easy for peer assessors to comment in certain places directly in the portfolio, rather than in the general comment section at the bottom of the page. This has been working pretty well for them because it allowed peers to have their specific instructions for each area that required their assessment. The nurses also need to do a self assessment for each competency. So far, they have used regular 'Text' blocks for that. However, when it comes to the final assessment, they sometimes need to add more details to their reflections. But these additions are not tracked, making it more difficult for an assessor to see what changes the nurse has made after their conversation. This issue doesn't happen with a peer assessment because there a comment cannot be changed once it has been published. Instead, additional comments can be added. That then resulted in the idea to make the peer assessment functionality available also for portfolio authors because it is a concept that they are already used to, and it allows the assessors to see additional details easily since they are tracked as further comments and have a date on them. In this case, the solution design phase was pretty short because it was very clear what change was to be made in Mahara. At other times, the solution design phase can take several days and involve a number of people to gather all the requirements to fully understand what the goal is and then come up with the idea how it can be implemented in Mahara. This solution design phase is crucial so everyone is on the same page for what the functionality will look like in the end. We often work with wireframes or mock-ups to illustrate the functionality to our clients so they can visualise it better. This also helps our developers, who know how to code, for example, a drop-down menu when they see one, because they have established guidelines for that. Have you ever seen the tree swing cartoon that depicts a swing in the tree in a number of different iterations? Each panel of the cartoon states how a person or how a particular role in the a project team imagined the swing to look like. But actually, none of them give the client what they wanted due to miscommunication. For example, one person explained it as three boards stacked on top of each other. Another understood it to be a simple plank on a rope. Yet another imagined an armchair hanging from the tree branch and so on. But what the client wanted was a tire on a rope hanging off a sturdy tree branch. I put a link to a couple of online resources into the episode notes, where you can see the cartoon and also read up on its fascinating history, which was traced back all the way to 1973. I find it's a great visualisation to illustrate the importance of requirements gathering and bringing everyone onto the same page. Since not everybody understands technical explanations, we find the best is to work with wireframes or mock-ups with our clients to show them what the finished functionality would look like as that is how they usually interact with Mahara. They then trust us that the code on the back-end supports that functionality and is built in a way that uses existing design elements to fit into Mahara and is also maintainable. But now back to our assessment functionality. Once we confirmed the requirements with our clients and received their sign-off, a developer took on the task of making the necessary changes. They expanded the existing peer assessment feature to also allow for self assessments. A list of detailed changes and new requirements helped during the development process. Then came the peer review process in which, typically, two other team members are involved. Another developer reviewed the code based on our coding guidelines to check that there are no mistakes. Someone else then performed the manual testing to ensure that all requirements were implemented as intended. When issues were found, the developer fixed them, and the peer review process went into another round. After this internal review process, we made the functionality available to our clients for their own testing before it was rolled out on the live site. Once it was all signed off, we also merged the code into Mahara because we saw the usefulness of this functionality for other organisations. Switching between peer and self assessment is now an option in the block configuration in Mahara 25.04. Let me give you another example. One of my colleagues in Australia implemented a feature that I'm excited about, and that feature is for Monash University, who started using Mahara more widely last year. Before then, students in the Faculty of Arts and in the Faculty of Information Technology had created portfolios in Mahara on their own instances. But in 2024 Mahara became available to more faculties. It's been exciting to follow this process fairly closely. Portfolios play an increasingly important role at the university with the move to more and more programmatic assessment. Portfolios are well positioned to support that movement as they help with the personalisation of the learning experience and also formative assessment option amongst others. What did we do for Monash University? We improved the continuing professional development, abbreviated as CPD, functionality within Mahara by a long stretch. Originally, CPD was a plugin that James Kerrigan developed for Mahara 1.3. That was back in 2012. Geoff Rowland then maintained it for a number of years. James was a student on the Foundation degree in Computing and Internet Technology at the University Centre Yeovil. The plugin was built on top of the 'Plans' functionality and allowed students to keep a tally of the number of hours they had spent on the activities that they logged. We often used this plugin for our own clients and then pretty much maintained it once Geoff retired. That's why we decided last year to merge it into Mahara core itself to make it more readily available to everybody and also easier to maintain for us. Some of that work was sponsored by some of our clients who make heavy use of this feature. The university wanted to provide students more guidance in terms of what types of CPD activities would count towards the total number of hours, and make it easier for them to see their progress. Because the change was much bigger than the one for the peer assessment, we had several meetings and also mock-ups before we settled on the additions. It was also important that the additions were flexible enough to accommodate CPD requirements of different study programmes. That is also always something we take into account when a functionality is considered for Mahara itself. Would this be useful for others? And if so, should there be a configuration option available? Sometimes the configuration is quite minimal because we do need to stick to the scope that we agreed on and also to the budget that is available. For the CPD changes, we already know that some additions would be welcomed, and thus, the changes that made it into Mahara 25.04 are a first iteration. We rolled out this functionality to the university's Mahara site directly upon completion of the testing, and students can now see all their logged hours for different categories within their overall CPD experience and have graphs available that quickly show them how much they have already achieved in the different categories that they need to track. Our clients do not need to wait for a new version of Mahara to be released in order to use new features. In most cases, new features can be back ported to a recent version of Mahara and thus be available quickly without depending on our release cycle. The assessment block and also the CPD enhancements are examples of fairly small and larger changes to Mahara that are a result of conversations with our clients and also knowing how other community members are using Mahara. The more we know how you are currently using Mahara within your organisation, the better an idea we have what features are used more often and where we should be spending our time on for improvements. Last year, for example, we conducted a usability review of Mahara that encompassed a review of the information architecture of the platform, as well as interviews with community members, from students to lecturers, learning designers, and also support staff so that we could gain more insight into what works well for them and where they are problems that we should resolve. All of that combined resulted in our proposal for a Mahara refresh. We shared the main wireframes for that and also recently a video showcasing some of the main screens as mock-ups from a design perspective. The episode notes have the links to these videos if you haven't seen them. You can also already see a few changes to support this refresh in our 25.04 release. For example, we have a new icon set, combined the 'Image' and'Gallery' blocks, and made a few other improvements as a result of this usability review that support our work on our roadmap. The bigger changes, we plan to release those in April 2026. If you want to be involved in testing any of these changes during the development process, please do get in touch with me. Contributors to the Mahara project are not only developers, but also people doing the business analysis, usability and accessibility reviews and improvements, graphic design, and general testing. Other community members translate Mahara into a range of languages, report issues and feature ideas, and provide support in our community forums. All of these community members and a few other roles that I haven't mentioned here contribute to the success of the project. Now, if you want to give Mahara 25.04 a go, you can do so right now. You can set up an account on our development instance and get started. If you want to test some of the administrator features, please let me know so I can change your permissions on the site. Also, if your organisation has its own testing site, you can install the 25.04 code and test it with your own data. More information on how you can access the code is available in the announcement of the preview version. Do you have an idea for a new feature or an enhancement? Share it either in a forum post or on our enhancement tracker. If our tracker already contains an improvement that you would like to see in Mahara, add your thoughts to it and give it a thumbs up, so we know more concretely that the feature would benefit others. And so this is it for this episode of 'Create. Share. Engage.' in which I shared how an idea makes it into Mahara and what some of the new features are in Mahara 25.04. I look forward to seeing you at one of our future events. Besides webinars and community organised events, we also have monthly'Ask Me Anything' sessions to which you can drop in and ask your Mahara questions. See you then. This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' today, just with me, your host, Kristina Hoeppner, Project Lead and Product Manager of the portfolio platform Mahara. Head to our website podcast.mahara.org where you can find resources and the transcript for this episode. This podcast is produced by Catalyst IT. Our next episode will air in two weeks. I hope you will listen again and tell a colleague about our podcast so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, and engage.