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 it's just be me in this episode as I'd like to share a few thoughts about my recent trip to Europe with you. I had the opportunity to participate in MoodleMoot DACH, the MoodleMoot for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, that was held in Northern Germany this year. This unconference was not only attended by German speakers, but a very international crowd had found their way to Lübeck at the start of September to participate in this unconference where participants suggested sessions each day, and it was very much about sharing and collaborating. I didn't participate in the two developer days that preceded the unconference, but heard wonderful things about it with developers creating new plugins or making progress on code they had been stuck at previously.

It was good to catch up with people that also used Mahara, especially with those that I knew would not attend MoodleMoot Global a few days later in Scotland and whom I wouldn't see at other meetings during this trip. One special person I met again after many years was Andrew Lyons who was an early contributor to Mahara when he worked in the UK, but whom I first met in person in January 2014 when I attended a conference in Perth in Australia as he had started to work for Moodle HQ at that time.

I enjoyed sitting in on sessions and learning about the new Moodle design system, how Moodle does automated testing, which is similar to our Behat test suite in principle, and what AI conversations are had in the Moodle community. Stepping outside of the Mahara and wider portfolio community and attending events such as this allows me to reflect on our own practices and think about whether we should discuss some of the presented ideas. That's why I also always like attending Kawaiicon, an information security focused conference because information security is important in every software project. Learning about the nefarious ways that systems can be exploited helps being vigilant and get ideas of tools or processes to investigate further for our own work.

At MoodleMoot DACH, for example, the introduction of the new Moodle design system reminded me of the conversations that we've had in the Mahara team several years ago now on how to support developers in creating consistent visual elements. One of our team members developed a style guide that allowed for easy copying of code. The wonderful thing about the style guide was that it automatically adapted to the theme in which you viewed the site. Keeping things consistent helps in reducing cognitive load and thus contributes to improved accessibility of Mahara.

The consistent use of visual elements across the entire platform is currently at the forefront of our development work with the refresh of the Mahara look and feel. This is an enormous undertaking for our entire team because pretty much every single page in Mahara needs to be converted to the new design. Throughout my travels I could demo the progress of this work to our community members and was chuffed that everybody likes it and is looking forward to the changes. This is a wonderful acknowledgement of all the work that has already gone into this project starting with informal chats and dedicated interviews that our business analyst Rob Hill conducted with students, learning designers, instructors, and staff from support companies. These, along with Rob's own review of the information architecture of Mahara, resulted in a consolidation of the look and feel for Mahara across all of our screens. 

Over the years, we have experimented with new ideas in different areas of Mahara, but have not always carried these ideas through in all areas of the platform. That has resulted in a number of inconsistencies that we are now tackling. It's good to establish a new base line. The re-design project is lead by our graphic designer Evonne Cheung and developer Doris Tam. Phil Sainty, Yvonne Waterman, and also our tech lead Robert Lyon are involved in updating the code to support the new design. I'm not going to get into the intricate technical details of this project, but suffice it to say, it's a massive undertaking. Our QA tester Mark Aiono tests changes incrementally where possible, but the majority of the testing will be done next year when all the components have been converted.

We'll continue to demo the changes, and I'm planning on making a recording before the holidays to showcase the progress. We usually also show off the redesign at our Mahara AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions to everyone who's interested in seeing the latest changes. The last sessions for this year will be held on the 25th of November and on the 17th December 2025. You can find the links to these sessions in the show notes. These AMA sessions are a chance to ask our Mahara team any questions live. We alternate the session times to make it possible for community members in different parts of the world to participate more easily. I look forward to seeing you there even if you don't have a concrete question. Sometimes, people come along to listen to the questions of other people, which I love because we often don't know what question we should ask, and lurking can be very beneficial for such incidental learning.

But back to my travels in September and October: Together with a number of other Catalystas, I attended MoodleMoot Global in Edinburgh in Scotland. It was wonderful to catch up with our overseas colleagues and meet Mahara community members there as well. Whether I meet people at public events or at smaller meetings, it's so good to have in-person conversations. Especially at a multi-day event there is the opportunity to talk several times, share meals, and not just talk about work as is generally the case in tightly scheduled online meetings.

Whether in Scotland, Germany, Belgium, or Switzerland, which were my travel destinations this year, everybody is very passionate about supporting their learners and getting the most out of the systems they have. They also appreciated all the work that our team has put into Mahara, and love the features and changes we've been able to make thanks to the financial contributions via the subscriptions and also other projects that clients funded. 

One of the big new features that I've also talked about a lot are the enhancements to the CPD functionality in Mahara. Thanks to funding from Monash University, we could create a visual overview for continuing professional development activities along with a more structured categorisation of these activities to allow portfolio authors and viewers to see in which categories most activities have taken place. When I show functionalities like these, it usually only takes a few seconds for my conversation partners to brainstorm how they could use that in their own portfolio work to document and visualise learning better. This immediate thinking about how this could be useful shows to me that everyone I talked to is very passionate about their work in general, but in also particular about portfolios because the portfolios offer students the flexibility to personalise their learning and reflect on it to make sense of what they have learned.

I find that with portfolios we can see that educators put their learners first and want to ensure that they can see themselves in what they learn, that it is relevant to their lives or that they can make the connection to their lives, and thus make the learning more meaningful to them.

I'd like to thank everybody to whom I talked over the course of this trip, who has taken time to chat about portfolios and Mahara, shared their current work as well as ideas for future projects and not to forget shared laughs, a tea or other beverage, lunch, or dinner to make this trip one to remember.

Now over to you. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' Head to our website, podcast.mahara.org, where you can find resources and the transcript for this episode. It would be great if you shared our podcast with a colleague of yours so they can listen as well. Until then, create, share, and engage.