Analysis and Specification

Certainly, the most important phase of all to get right is the Analysis and Specification phase. It is always best to try your absolute hardest to iron out as many difficulties as you can, before you unleash any new learning process upon your end users.

Deciding if Mahara is right for you

Before you do anything else, consider why you want a lifelong learning ePortfolio system such as Mahara and if you have the appropriate working conditions to make a success of it. There are, broadly speaking, two different types of ePortfolio system:

• The institutionally-owned Learning Management System

• The learner-owned Personal Learning Environment

As demonstrated in this book, Mahara is very much the latter. It is focused on offering learners a place to gather, store, and share their work with others as they progress along their personal and lifelong learning journeys.

Some other ePortfolio systems are focused, instead, on offering a facility to track learner-submitted work according to institutional — or accrediting body — needs. That is not what Mahara is about.

Mahara is a user-centered informal and reflective learning environment that also:

• Provides a platform from which a user can present his/her learning and competencies to others, for example a prospective employer, an application to a university, a promotion panel, or during a professional development review

• Provides a templating facility for ePortfolio pages

• Offers ease of use (no need to be a webhead!)

• Facilitates social networking in "Communities of Practice"

  Note

  Digital habitats

  You can read about stewarding digital communities in the book Digital Habitats by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith. It's well worth a read if you're thinking about setting up your own online communities of practice. You can find the book at http://technologyforcommunities.com/. Here, you can gain access to additional reading material.

• Allows for collaborative group pages

• Offers monitoring of other people's pages by means of a watchlist

• Provides a system for uploading and getting feedback on assessment items

• Allows you to feedback on other people's pages

• Supports a simple personal and professional development planning process, helping a learner with their action planning for their lifelong learning or career development processes

• Acts as a walled garden where you can control the user base

• Provides a very private individual storage space for learner's own artefacts

• Supports platform integration with an ever expanding range of Web 2.0 tools, such as YouTube and Picasa

• Offers the option to copy and move your portfolio to another location (including non-Mahara ePortfolio applications that support Leap2A)

• Allows you to limit and extend users' storage space

• Runs on a web server (making it available whenever and from wherever)

Mahara itself is not a Learning Management System. It, therefore, does not:

• Cross-reference against assessment/accreditation criteria set out by an accrediting body (such as formative and summative assessment trackers, or occupational standards for NVQs in the UK)

• Provide an audit trail of submitted and graded work

• Neatly archive and retain learner submitted work

Mahara, however, understands and responds to the fact that some institutions like to formally assess their learners' work, whilst still adopting a personalized learning approach as their driving paradigm. One option a learner may have in Mahara is to submit his/her work for assessment by tutors (see Chapter 6, Course Groups and Other Roles in Mahara). But the tracking of learner progress would then have to be facilitated by integrating Mahara with some other system such as:

• A tutor maintained spreadsheet: This could be stored and shared in a Mahara group files area or within a Google document, for example.

• The Gradebook in Moodle (http://wiki.mahara.org/Roadmap/Moodle_Mahara_Integration): Mahara already supports Single Sign-On integration with Moodle, a system that can be used for assessment of achievements according to some criteria. This can be used to track progress against a time-tabled program of activity.

Mahara itself, then, is not trying to be a Learning Management System. It is a place where learners can reflect on their learning and showcase their work to others. As Mahara is pluggable, it's possible for development of further plugins that address this need for assessment.

The view of the Mahara project is that Moodle (and its competitors LMSs/VLEs) should do Moodle-like things and Mahara should do Mahara-like things. From Moodle v2.0 onwards, Moodle provides a portfolio API, which allows single click export of files, forums, and blog posts uploaded into Moodle across as artefacts in your own Mahara space.

Note

For more information about transferring information to your Mahara ePortfolio from Moodle, see the Moodle documentation at http://docs.moodle.org/en/Mahara_portfolio.

There is also a fantastic extension for Mahara and Moodle that allows learners to submit their Mahara ePortfolio pages to their tutors in Moodle. It provides tutors with the ability to set an assignment where learners can submit their Mahara pages as assignments and have them graded as they would in an uploaded document or test.

All of this enables learners to use Moodle for taught and outcomes-driven assessment processes, and Mahara for their personalized, and ongoing, reflection/informal learning activities.

The plugin (plugins) can be found at https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/System_Administrator's_Guide/Moodle//Mahara_Integration/View_Submission and there is a PDF documentation for System Administrators, discussing Moodle/Mahara integration, that can be found at https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/System_Administrator%27s_Guide/Moodle//Mahara_Integration.

Recently, a new distribution of Moodle — TotaraLMS — has been developed. Totara adds a wrapper of LMS (learning management system) functionality on top of the Moodle vle's core code. Mahara can interact with TotaraLMS in exactly the same ways that it can interact with Moodle. TotaraLMS offers:

• A sophisticated heirarchy of competencies management tool

• Management of organizations and organizational roles

• Per user/per role learning plans

• user/role dashboards

• A sophisticated reporting tool

TotaraLMS for apprenticeships is a distribution of TotaraLMS, which adds a wrapper of functionality on top of the TotaraLMS core code in order to serve the more specific needs of apprenticeships programmes delivery in the UK. This codeline is managed by OssServices.com. The integration with Mahara is sophisticated and additional features include:

• An evidence tab on the learning plan that allows assessors to associate their own files as well as Mahara pages with QCF competencies

• A progress tracker on a learning plan, which tracks and displays progress against QCF (or similar) Awards, Certificates, and Diplomas — competencies can be achieved by assessor evidence and/or by Moodle course/activity completions

If you have decided that a lifelong learning ePortfolio such as Mahara is for you, it is now wise to decide whether Mahara is the platform that is best-suited for your organizational needs or not.

Danube University (Austria) researchers, Dr. Klaus Himpsl-Gutermann and Dr. Peter Baumgartner have published the document called Evaluation of E-Portfolio Software in February 2009 (download the PDF at http://epac.pbworks.com/f/ijet_paper_himpsl_baumgartner.pdf). Here is a link to Klaus Himpsl-Gutermann's Mahara profile for you to find out more information, https://mahara.org/user/view.php?id=238.

Dr. Himpsl-Gutermann and Dr. Baumgartner have evaluated and compared a range of lifelong learning ePortfolio solutions against the following criteria (and sub-criteria):

• Essential criteria

  • Input of keywords

  • Internal cross-references

  • External cross-references

  • Publication on the web

  • Pricing and license schemes

  • Simple data export

  • Support of all currently used A-grade browsers

• Collecting, organizing, and selecting

  • Simple data import

  • Comfortable data import

  • Searching, sequencing, and filtering

  • Annotations to files

  • Aggregating (integration of external data via feeds)

  • Version control of files

• Reflecting, testing, verifying, and planning

  • Guidelines for reflection

  • Guidelines for competences

  • Guidelines for evaluation (self assessment and assessment by others)

  • Guidelines for goals, personal development, and career management

  • Guidelines for feedback (advice, tutoring, and mentoring)

• Representing and publishing

  • Access control by users (owner, peers, authority, and public)

  • Adaptation of the display — layout (flexible placing and boilerplates)

  • Adaptation of the display — colors, fonts, and design

  • Publishing of several portfolios, or alternatively, various views

• Administrating, implementing, and adapting

  • Development potential of the provider and company profile

  • Enabling technologies (programming language, operating system, and so on)

  • Authentification and user administration (backed-up interfaces, and so on)

  • e-learning standards

  • Migration/storage/export

• Usability

  • User interface

  • Syndicating (choice of feeds for the individual portfolio)

  • Availability and accessibility

  • Navigation/initial training/help

  • External and internal information function

  • Interchangeable and adaptable user-defined boilerplates

  • Personal storage, respective export function

As you can probably guess, Mahara does very well in this comparison. It comes out joint-top of the list alongside a proprietary (and equally excellent, if very different) alternative ePortfolio solution known as PebblePad (http://www.pebblepad.co.uk/).

Despite being good, PebblePad is not open source, although it allows the transfer of portfolio data via the Leap2A standard. The fact that Mahara is an open source and modular product means that:

• The code may be copyrighted by others (mostly by Catalyst IT), but it is under an open license (GNU General Public License — http://www.gnu.org/licenses/), meaning that it will always be available for you to use, and that it will always be cost-free for you to re-use.

• You can, therefore, switch your technical support agency at any point (there is no vendor lock-in).

• The product will always exist even if the current maintainers (currently Catalyst IT in New Zealand) choose to discontinue their support for it.

• Everybody can collaborate to develop what is needed (there is a modular/plugin architecture, and you can also contribute to the core code, if the core developers like what you have done!).

• There are no license fees for downloading and using the Mahara software — you can simply grab the code and start hosting it, if you have access to a web server. The software can also be hosted on a server within your organization without paying anything but the cost of server maintenance.

Understanding your own specific needs and working conditions

Never look for some place new to go until you completely understand and appreciate where you already are. Never try to make a change until you have a clear vision, and completely understand the benefits you will gain from making that change.

Here's how to start:

1. 1. Clearly set out your overall aims:

   • What educational objectives do you want to achieve?

   • What business objectives do you want to achieve?

   • What organizational objectives do you want to achieve?

2. 2. Understand your own working context. If you find yourself answering "no" to any of the following questions. You should start thinking, "Is it actually possible to turn this no into a yes?"

   • Do all those involved — your leaders, teachers/tutors, day-to-day administrators, IT support staff, and your future end users — have a common vision for your ePortfolio? (Even if you are working as a go-it-alone teacher, are you sure that enough of your students will buy in to this?)

   • Is there a supportive external context for your ePortfolio implementation? Is there explicit support for this coming to you, for example, from central office, from government-funded agencies, or from accrediting bodies, trades guilds or worker's unions?

   • Is there, and will there be, a consistent and reliable inflow of funding for your site's support?

   • Will there be a dedicated steering group of visionaries and power-brokers who will work to make your implementation a success?

   • Will you continuously invest to employ or skill-up the competent staff that you will need in order to disseminate knowledge to newer users?

3. 3. Ensure you have sufficiently skilled and available (time/motivation to support) technical and pedagogical support infrastructures in place.

4. 4. Ensure that your target end users have appropriate access to your Mahara system not only in terms of a reasonable internet supply, but also in terms of physical access to machines in both working and home-life contexts.

5. 5. Understand that change affects emotions:

   Successful change = Vision + Skills + Incentives + Resources + Action Plan

If you want to implement an ePortfolio solution successfully, you need to be able to develop and disseminate a shared vision. This vision optimistically encourages people to embrace changes in both technology-adoption and learning approaches. To succeed, this needs top-level support and needs to be a fully aligned part of a whole organizational approach. You will not only need to model the way for others to follow, but also need to enable and to motivate others to act.

You will need to know and to broadcast to your people where you are going, and why you are going that way. You will need to put the required training in place to make that vision happen. People will need incentives. Incentives can be financial, recognition-oriented, status-oriented, promotion-oriented, and so on. Adoption of your new ePortfolio system should become an expectation, part of a learner's assessment criteria, and part of a tutor's job description. You will also need a clearly structured action plan and appropriately designated responsibilities alongside sensible timescales.

The following table by Jacqueline Thousand and Richard Villa, neatly illustrates the negative emotional impact likely to arise (notice in particular the far right-hand column), if just one of these elements are not in place.

Vision	Skills	Incentives	Resources	Action Plan	Results in
✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	Change
-	✓	✓	✓	✓	Confusion
✓	-	✓	✓	✓	Anxiety
✓	✓	-	✓	✓	Opposition
✓	✓	✓	-	✓	Frustration
✓	✓	✓	✓	-	False starts

Adapted from Knoster, T., Villa R., & Thousand, J. (2000), A framework for thinking about systems change. In R. villa & J. Thousand (Eds.),Restructuring for caring and effective education: Piecing the puzzle together (pp. 93-128). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

Prof. Gordon Joyes from the University of Nottingham first introduced "Threshold Concepts" and their importance when applied to an ePortfolio implementation. Joyes attributes the idea of "Threshold Concepts" to Jan Meyer and Ray Land (http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk//docs/ETLreport4.pdf). Essentially, the point being made is that in order for somebody to perform a task effectively, he/she needs to go through some doorways of understanding. If these doorway thresholds are not traversed, the activity is not likely to be a success. For those of you implementing ePortfolios and encouraging their adoption, Joyes and his colleagues have so far come up with five important threshold concepts:

• Concept 1 — Purpose: The purpose(s) for the ePortfolio must be aligned to the particular context. You need to make your ePortfolio genuinely work for you. It should help you to perform your learning and business functions effectively.

• Concept 2 — Learning Activity Design: There must be a conscious design and support of a learning activity/activities suited to the purpose and the context. Mahara alone is nothing without a clear organizational sense of learning delivery structure. Your tutors need to be adopting a learner-driven, personalized learning delivery model, only then will Mahara be able to come into its own as a useful resource.

• Concept 3 — Processes: The processes involved in the creation of the ePortfolio in this context must be understood, and both technical and pedagogic support needs to be provided. Both staff and learners need to be trained to understand how the platform works, and also how it can be made to work to best effect.

• Concept 4 — Ownership: ePortfolio processes and outcomes need to be owned by the student. This not only leads to considering portability of their data, but also whether the tool allows use of their own phone camera, audio recorder, Web 2.0 applications, and so on. It also leads you to consider the learners' engagement with your Mahara platform. The learners need to see the Mahara environment as their own. They need to see it as a useful resource, which helps them to engage with your institution as they learn.

• Concept 5 — Disruptive Nature: ePortfolios are disruptive from a pedagogic, technological, and organizational perspective. It is unlikely that Mahara will fit exactly within existing systems. Some changes will need to be made, and this will upset some people and disrupt some existing processes.

Unless you understand these five (and probably more) issues, you won't succeed in your action plan. By understand, we mean more than simply know that they are issues. You don't just need to be aware of these issues, you actually need to understand at your very core that these are centrally important — indeed key — to the success of your ePortfolio implementation. Unless you are practically oriented towards implementing your ePortfolios, while taking these issues into account, you must truly understand that you are likely to struggle.

Choosing between a Mahara-partner supported site or your own install

When choosing whether to use a Mahara partner supported site or to go it alone, the trade off is usually the extent and expertise of the support available (for example, from a Mahara partner) versus the amount of control you have over your own system (for example, total control over your own server). A compromise is usually possible and most Mahara partners are willing to serve to support your managers, educators, and IT experts to support themselves. You can view a full list of official Mahara partners at https://mahara.org/partners.

Scoping out your implementation plan

You are going to have to draw up some sort of implementation plan. We will leave you to determine for yourself how best to draw this up, but we will raise here some of the issues that we think you will need to address. Essentially, you are going to have to manage five actions:

• Decide on your implementation timeframe.

• Ensure you have staff commitment.

• Draft out your initial Mahara site plan, structure, and visual design.

• Draft out your Mahara-specific policies.

• Start to embed Mahara use into wider institutional and program priorities.

Deciding on your implementation timeframe

Your implementation timeframe may be longer or shorter depending upon factors such as:

• The size of your organization:

  • Are you going to implement at local level or at a large scale?

• The complexity of the Mahara platform you decide to implement

• The levels of digital literacy amongst your client group:

  • Do your action team or consultants have the expertise and motivation to develop quality content quickly?

  • Do you need to provide templates for your users to scaffold their entry into creating their own ePortfolio?

  • Do your end users suffer much from techno-fear?

  • Do you need to provide basic training in recording audio, video, image editing, and so on besides specific Mahara training?

• What staff resources you have available:

  • Are you directing staff or temporary consultants according to a project implementation plan?

  • Are you allowing these people the time they will really need?

  • Otherwise, are you happy for a much slower and more participative development process?

Ensuring you have staff commitment

In a large organizational implementation, if the ePortfolio idea does not have the support of 75 percent of an organization's senior management team, it is unlikely to be a success. Your leadership has to be dedicated to committing both financial and staffing resources to the implementation project! You will need to set up a steering group, if you really want the implementation to happen, and this steering group will have to include at least one major power-broker from your organization and at least one Mahara expert or visionary. Again, you may be wise to bring in a Mahara partner consultant as your expert/visionary.

In a smaller, more local implementation, the potential users really need to be telling you that they like the idea of using a digital ePortfolio before you throw yourself into it. Bear in mind that people often dislike anything they don't already know.

Drafting out your initial Mahara content, site structure, visual design, and staff roles

Make sure you have a good understanding of how Mahara works before you start. You have already made a good start by buying and reading this book. While it is wise to be aware of the fact that your Mahara content and structure may well change significantly as time goes by, it is even wiser to have a clear understanding of how your site is going to be essentially structured right from the outset. Let's get thinking:

• Who is going to install and set up your Mahara site? Are you giving them the time they need to do it?

• What are you going to do in terms of site theming?

• Are you going to reconfigure your Mahara site to work differently in any way? If so, you might have to buy in the right expertise to achieve this. One of the joys of open source software is precisely its configurability, but you will still need to buy in the skills to make these configurations happen. You may wish to integrate your Mahara look, feel, and functionality with your Moodle site for example, or with a website Content Management System such as Joomla!. Alternatively, you may wish to change aspects of the Mahara code to make it work in the particular way you want it to work. Some organizations, for example, like to change the word "Résumé" to "CV", and others like, for example, to close off the friends functionality within their site.

• Are there any integrations with other software that you will need to set up (such as Moodle)?

• Who will be the site administrator — controlling users, checking storage limits, monitoring acceptable use, and so on? If a staff member, will this be a dedicated element of their job description? Could you outsource this type of administrative support to, for example, a Mahara partner?

• Who will be responsible for monitoring external software developments, interoperability developments, and so on?

• Who is going to administer and report back on any end user surveys you conduct?

• Who is going to be your pedagogical visionary? How much time (and re-numeration) are they going to get to give presentations and enthuse about online reflective learning and knowledge transfer?

• Will you give any paid time to the tutors or managers you will be expecting to lead the way with your ePortfolio system? Will work on the ePortfolio platform become a paid element of their work, clearly articulated in their job description and properly timetabled into their working week?

• Will your IT support staff need Mahara training? Who will run this training?

• Who will provide first line technical support? (Basic help such as: "How do I log in?" "How do I upload my file?"). Would you prefer to outsource this support? Could you arrange and publish a timetable of offline and/or telephone and/or internet-live-support-based Mahara user "Support Surgeries" in which less confident users could approach competent ones for friendly and informal advice and support?

• Who will provide higher level technical support into the long-term? For example, bug fixing (which should be contributed back to the Mahara project), updating, upgrading, integrating (with other software), modifying, or extending your platform according to your needs. Would this be cheap and safe to outsource (an outsource supplier is often less likely to leave you in the lurch than an employee)?

• What Mahara user institutions are you going to set up, if any?

• What will be your core Mahara groups? Who should set these up?

• What will those groups actually exist to do? What will be their purpose?

  Note

  Tip! Start off by describing what already happens in a particular focus area offline and then apply that to what you hope will happen online.

• Who will be allocated responsibility for encouraging and moderating activity in those groups?

• What pages will need to be produced for your site?

• What other sites will need to link across to your Mahara site?

• What will be the main weblinks you will need to link to from your site?

• Who will set and monitor performance targets? Will this be a part of their job description?

Drafting out your Mahara-specific policies

You need to be clear as crystal about the rules of engagement! It is only fair on your end users and it is also fair on you. There is also, very often, an organizational need to draw up and adhere to formal policies. Here are some thoughts in this respect:

• What promises can you make in regards to the provision of Internet access? Will it be always available, freely available, and maintain a reasonable level of quality/stability?

• What terms and conditions of use will you need the users to agree to?

• What online responsibility/"netiquette" policies do you have in place?

• Is it important to set out an acceptable use policy?

• What privacy rights does the user have?

• Does the user leave the data with you when he/she completes his/her course/program/employment period? If so, for how long will they have access to the data when they leave?

• We advise you to leave intellectual property in the hands of the ePortfolio users themselves and not in the hands of your institution. ePortfolios should (in our view) be owned by the users themselves and remain their own responsibility until they contravene the institution's terms and conditions of acceptable use. This is often not possible, though. In the case of schools, colleges, and polytechnics, some countries make the institutions responsible by law to guarantee that no inappropriate content is hosted on their servers. If this is your case, you may decide to set up a procedure for regular spot-checks where an administrator masquerades as a random sample of learners (for instance, each month) to check up on users within your system.

• How effectively are you going to communicate policies such as these to your end users?

Starting to embed Mahara use into wider institutional and program priorities

If yours is a small-scale implementation, might you just be trailblazing the way for a large-scale implementation across your whole organization? If so, or if you are a larger organization already, here are some questions to get you thinking:

• Is Mahara usage a stated element of your curriculum delivery? Is the time to learn how to use Mahara explicitly allocated as part of a new user's workload?

• Is any requirement to engage with Mahara in a course, job role, or program clearly communicated and understood well in advance of any requirement to submit work?

• Is Mahara use referred to in your business development plan, organizational plan, and job descriptions?

• Is Mahara utilized in your quality improvement reviews and processes?

• Is Mahara adoption and use measured in your quality improvement reviews and processes?

• Are Mahara development workshops a fixed element of your staff's Induction and Continuing Professional Development Plans? Staff should be regularly discussing not only how to use the system technically, but also how to use the system for best learning and business impact and effect!