We’re all in the same boat – so why not share? We are all understaffed and under funded. We all want the best learning experience for our students. We all are juggling numerous projects it doesn’t make sense to me that we are all doing it independently of one another.

This belief was driven home to me at the end of last week. Friday 20th October Cambridge University hosted the first Mahoodle conference in the UK – where educators that were interested in Moodle (the learning management system) and Mahara (ePortfolio platform) presented on various developments/projects that they were involved in involving one or both platforms. While I always welcome events like this for the opportunity to network with colleagues from other institutions, I was particularly looking forward to this one; We got to present the final stages of the AAIM project. This project was a result of a collaboration between University of Sussex and Dublin City University. More details are available on the project website but in a nutshell the goal was to improve the analytic reporting within Mahara.

We are delighted to announce that as of yesterday, the reporting capability developed as a result of this project are now in core Mahara.

6 months of work, 40 contributors & great new functionality: We published #mahara 17.10 on Monday. @maharaproject https://t.co/BsdSu1PMnQ

— Catalyst IT (@CatalystNZ) November 1, 2017

We are now going to release as many of our Mahara plugins as we can to the community and will work with Catalyst (the company behind Mahara) to get as much of these developments into core so everyone can benefit.

Following our tremendously successful experience working with Sussex we are looking for more Mahara projects that we can collaborate on. If you have any ideas or up for being involved in collaboration please contact myself (@glynnmark) or David Walker from Sussex (@drdjwalker)