Mahara Eportfolios

Introduction
This guide provides advice about making eportfolios integral rather than peripheral to the teaching and learning process.

It is important that these elements are deliberately designed into the teaching and learner process, and carefully scaffolded for learners.

Follow this section for help with embedding Mahara into each stage of the teaching and learning process.

Setting up your course
To integrate eportfoio-based activities into your course plan, you will need to prepare:
 * your course 'presence' in Mahara, and
 * the tools and templates you will use to scaffold your students' learning (see later topics TOBELINKED)

You may want to create a Profile for your course. You will most certainly want to create a Group or your class, and add your students as members (i.e. Friends). You may want to establish discussion Forums for your Group, possibly separate ones for different course topics.

You will probably want to give your students access to key information and materials through one or more Views (or possibly WebCT/ Moodle). To do this will will first need to upload relevant Files (often called Artefacts)

You will probably refer to the following topics in the Mahara User Guide:

Profile: Profile, Profile Icons, My Resume, My Goals, My Skills, Edit Profile

Groups: My Groups, Create groups, Add members to groups, Find groups, Viewing group details

Friends: Friends, Control how friends are added, Find friends

Forums: Group Forums, Create forum, Create New Topic, Editing topics, Selecting actions for forum topics

Views: My Views, Create a view, Step One – Details, Step Two – Layout block, Step Three – Configure block settings, Step Four – Assign Access to View, Providing a Link to a View

Artefacts: My Files, Upload a file, Tags, Create a Folder