Mahara Emergency Downtime - May 19th

EMERGENCY DOWNTIME - MAY 19th - 7-9am

In order to assist further diagnosis of the issues affecting ULCC (UCS' Mahara Hosting) during the recent DDoS attacks, ULCC shall be upgrading the firmware on the firewalls as an emergency change on Tuesday 19th May between 07:00 and 09:00.

Expected Risk:

During this time the firewalls will fail over between the active and standby devices as part of the upgrade process so short breaks in service will be experienced.  The upgrade process is expected to take up to an hour to complete, but the services should be deemed as being intermittent during the full 2 hour period to allow for testing of the new firmware.

It is advised that you do not access Mahara for this at risk period.

Mahara Upgrade Complete

UCS' e-Portfolio system, Mahara, was successfully upgraded this morning to the latest stable version 1.10.2.

The upgrade went smoothly with only 10 minutes of downtime at 8:15am.

After our testing and checks, Mahara is now back open for staff and students to use.

If you are a student and wish to utilise Mahara to keep an e-Portfolio or a reflective journal, simply head over to http://mahara.ucs.ac.uk and register for a new account using your UCS email address.

If you are a staff member who would like to use Mahara with your students, please contact the Elevate Team in Learning Services - elevate@ucs.ac.uk

Future blog posts will detail some of the new features and functions.

Mahara Upgrade Tomorrow!

This is the last reminder that UCS' e-Portfolio system, Mahara, is being upgraded to the latest stable version (1.10.2) Tuesday 17th of February between 7am and 9am.

The whole of Tuesday is seen as an at risk period and it is advised to only use Mahara after we have verified the upgrade has been successful and have completed all of our testing.

If you wish to view some of the new features the new version brings, please follow the link below:

https://mahara.org/features

Mahara Upgrade - New Features Spotlight

With UCS' e-Portfolio system (Mahara) being upgraded next week on Tuesday 17th of February between 7am-9am, we thought we would take this opportunity to focus on a key new feature/change that will come with the upgrade.

This new feature is the updated easy to use drag and drop navigation for editing portfolio pages.

Currently you have a set of tabs which run horizontally across the screen with icons depicting elements which you can use in your portfolio page. There is then a quite small area below where you drag those icons.

This has proved to be a little confusing at times, especially users who are working in Internet Explorer or those who have smaller screen resolutions.

The new interface condenses the elements into more readable text rather than icons for quicker navigation and a larger working area to the right of the menu.

This is how the new portfolio page editing will look like:

As you can see from the image above, the design is a lot easier to read and hopefully in a more sensible area to work with.

If you wish to get a head start with some of the changes and what they mean to you, here is a link to Mahara's support pages of the new version.

http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.10/index.html

Mahara Upgrade - Update

This is just a small post to remind everyone that UCS' e-Portfolio system, Mahara, is getting upgraded on Tuesday 17th of February.

The upgrade has been scheduled between 7am - 9am, the rest of the day will be seen as an at risk period.

Here is a small video detailing some highlights of the new Mahara 1.10 upgrade.

You can also see the individual features at the following website - https://mahara.org/features

Mahara Upgrade - New Features

We thought we would take some time to post some of the new features coming with this months Mahara upgrade. (Tuesday 17th of February)

Mahara will be upgraded from version 1.7.3 to 1.10.2 This means we will be upgrading a full 3 stable releases, this will naturally bring with it lots of new features and functions.

There is an extensive list of updates, however we will list the new features relevant to the end user below:

New Features

• Streamlined easier-to-use "Text" block 
• The new "Note" block retains all the removed features of the Text block 
• Streamlined rich text editor, with a toggle button to access advanced features 
• "Messaging" profile tab replaced with "Social media" tab with newer options 
• Added a "sent" box alongside the inbox for user messages 
• Groups: "Objectionable content" button for forum posts 
• Groups: Forum moderators can relocate forum posts between forums 
• Groups: Option to auto-create a LEAP2a archive of submitted pages 
• Groups: More control over which group members receive feedback & shared page notifications 
• Accessibility! W3C WCAG 2.0 level AA (except for some admin pages)
• Profile completion progress bar
• "Post now" option for forum posts, to bypass post delay 
• Support for Creative Commons 4.0 licenses 
• New "Feedback" block, allows placing feedback as a block instead of at the bottom of the page 
• Can now show image descriptions in "Image Gallery" block 
• Can specify the sort order of files in a "Folder" block 
• "Folder" block can now have "Download all as zip" link 
• Improvements to watchlist notifications 
• "New group page" notification
• Turned the block chooser vertical and scrolling, to accommodate longer Pages 
• The Image block and Text Box block are now conveniently at the top of the block chooser 
• Page layouts can now have rows as well as columns 
• Users can import leap2a files into their existing Mahara account
• PDF block allows PDFs to be viewed in-line in a Page 
• Resume elements can have attachments 
• Notes (and text box blocks) can have attachments 
• Users are notified when they try to navigate away from a page with unsaved changes 
• Many more types of user content can have tags 
• Resume entries for electronic publications can now be hotlinks 
• Drag-and-drop to upload files 
• Page skins, which give individual users the ability to change the CSS of their Pages 
• “Additional HTML" config option for things such as Google Analytics

We will have a deeper look into some of the new features in a blog post next week.

UCS' Mahara Upgrade 17th February

UCS' e-Portfolio tool, Mahara, will be upgraded on the 17th of February to the latest stable release of the Mahara software, version 1.10.2.

The upgrade will take place between 7am and 9am on Tuesday the 17th of February. The rest of the day will be seen as an 'at risk' period while we complete our checks.

This upgrade will bring with it many many new features and abilities, including but not limited to:

• Many new blocks for portfolio pages
• Enhanced feedback routes
• Enhanced multimedia functionality
• Ability for users to archive and restore Leap2A files
• Inline PDF viewing in portfolio pages
• Drag and drop uploading of files

A blog post will come in the near future detailing a full list of features and changes.

Along with these new features, the upgrade will also make sure Mahara is up to date with it's security patches.

We would advise users of Mahara to not attempt to log in during the upgrade period. We will notify users via MyUCS when Mahara has been fully upgraded and our checks are complete.

If any users would like to get in touch with the Elevate Team about the use of e-Portfolios and Mahara, please contact us - elevate@ucs.ac.uk 

 

Mahara Disruption. Today 28th Jan!

Due to the recent news about the GHOST security vulnerability in Linux GNU Library, ULCC, our Mahara service provider will be patching their servers today between 2-5PM GMT to secure this threat.

Any outage shouldn't take too long as it's just a rolling restart of servers.

Here is the further communication from our suppliers.

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Yesterday a major security hole, GHOST (CVE-2015-0235) <https://www.qualys.com/research/security-advisories/GHOST-CVE-2015-0235.txt> , in the Linux GNU C Library (glibc) was identified by researchers at cloud security company Qualys. This vulnerability enables hackers to remotely take control of systems without even knowing any system IDs or passwords.

Following analysis today by our Linux team we need to apply patches to all Linux servers to remove this vulnerability. Unfortunately as this patches glibc, the GNU C library, it requires a system restart to implement as the files are in use by numerous processes running on the systems. The patching process is likely to cause a service outage of up to five minutes while the system is restarted, meaning your site/service will be unavailable during this time.

The patching process will take place today, 28 January 2015, between 2-5pm. We apologise for the short notice, but feel urgent action is required considering the severity of the threat.

----------------------------------------

We will update with more information as we receive it.

Mahara currently unavailable.

UCS' Mahara service is now back up and running, however it is advised that the next 24 hours are classed as an 'at risk' period with possible intermittent access. Our host ULCC will be monitoring the situation.

Mahara (http://mahara.ucs.ac.uk) is currently unavailable. We have contacted our host's support team regarding this matter.

We are currently awaiting a response and will update as soon as we know more.

Apologies for an inconvenience.

UPDATE - It has come to our attention that our host ULCC has experienced a power outage in London and is working hard to rectify the problem.

Read more here -> http://ulcc.ac.uk/news/network-outage

Introducing Open Badges in Mahara

This is a small post to raise your awareness of a new feature which we've introduced to UCS' Mahara e-Portfolio system. Open Badges.

If you are weren't aware, an Open Badge (http://www.openbadges.org) is a Mozilla backed, open standard framework for defining web badges, in all senses similar to a physical badge you used to get in Boy Scouts or Girl Guides.

A badge can be rewarded to an individual for any number of different achievements. Previous pilots and projects over the last couple of years in the higher education sector have been run to promote an achievement or evidence system based around the use of badges, some have used in house bespoke systems, however, there is growing evidence of using a central 'Backpack' like Mozilla's OpenBadges standard. For example:

'Seton Hall – Created campus wide badges for students who participate in campus events. It’s pretty neat because students can simply swipe their ID card at events to earn the badges. They have another program where freshman earn badges by attending mandatory freshman events.' (Croom, A (2014)) - http://adamcroom.com/2014/04/a-brief-history-of-digital-badges-in-higher-ed/

Well, now you can import and visualise a collection of your own badges into your Mahara e-Portfolio page. You can follow the steps below to import your badges:

If you don't have a Mozilla Backpack, follow this link --> http://www.openbadges.org and register using an email address. If you already have a backpack you can skip to the next step.

1. In Mahara, go to your 'Profile' option under the 'Content' tab
2. Navigate to the 'Contact Information' section
3. Make sure the email address listed is the same as your Mozilla Backpack one, if it isn't, click the 'Add' button and add a the address you used to register for your Mozilla Backpack
4. Click 'Save Profile' at the bottom of the page.
5. You will need to validate your new email address (email will be sent)
6. Go to your portfolio page you wish to add the badges to
7. Click the 'Edit this page'
8. Click the 'External Content' option
9. Drag the 'Open Badges' (Shield icon) onto your portfolio page
10. Depending on what badges you have (if any) you will see what 'Collection' you wish to add.
11. You may need to create a collection in your backpack which is public. 

Any badges you are rewarded with, wherever they are from will now appear on your portfolio page.

Mahara Stories - Student's View

Recently we have been asking the users of our Mahara e-Portfolio system to volunteer some time to answer some questions about how they have used the system.

Here is the first of the student's view.

Louise now uses Mahara regularly and states she would now continue to use some sort of electronic portfolio after leaving UCS.

The course Elevate ran, 'e-Portfolios for the reflective learner' was mentioned as being the element that raised her awareness of Mahara before she started using it for her course.

Many many thanks to Louise Kearney for taking the time to help us collect these stories.

Student Inductions 2014 (February Starters)

The Elevate Team attended a total of six student inductions this month to introduce a new influx of students to some technologies they could use to enhance their learning outside of UCS. The tools that were on offer to the students were:

• Using Twitter as a Personal Learning Network
• Social Bookmarking with Diigo
• Collaborative working using Google Drive

There has been a change this year to the lineup of tools, we moved Mahara out of the list of options to choose from and added it as a mandatory item, mainly to raise students awareness of the tool and encourage it's use away from the tools they have to use for their UCS studies. We used to mention it as an option students could pick from to discuss (Chosen using audience response clickers) further in the presentation, however it was a rarely chosen item.

The structure of the sessions runs through a couple of the services here at UCS, we don't run through any how-tos or tutorials, simply highlight the fact they are available and what they provide students.

We then move onto some tools that can be used outside of UCS to enhance the students learning, such as the above mentioned tools.

The idea was to then raise Mahara's profile to round-off the session focusing on bringing in some of those experiences and evidence into an e-Portfolio service. However after answering the influx of questions during and after the demo of two of the tools, we've found we regularly run out of time to discuss Mahara in any great detail.

Taking the above into account, we will look at rearranging the session again to bring Mahara back into the front of the presentation but explicitly removing any attachment to it being a mandatory UCS learning tool and more of a space 'provided' by UCS. We can then adjust the demo accordingly to how much time we have left, as we would rather leave out less important features from the tools rather than lose the pitch we could give Mahara give an allotted position in the session.

e-Portfolios for the reflective learner - How did it go?

From the 9th to the 16th of December we ran an online course entitled 'e-Portfolios for the reflective learner'. This course has emerged from UCS' new Digital Literacies Programme - http://ucsdigitalliteracy.blogspot.co.uk, along with another online course based around LearnUCS' quiz engine and objective testing.

For this course however, we used our Mahara system to help and guide students in building an e-portfolio and raising their awareness of being a reflective learner.

You can see the pitch for the course here - http://ucsdigitalliteracy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/e-portfolios-for-reflective-practitioner.html

And take a look here to see how we structured the course - http://goo.gl/SmCnjF

The interest in this course was surprising, accumulating 30 signups, mainly from the student base here and given just a week to signup, I feel this is quite an achievement and I think highlights the effectiveness of our communication channels and use of social media.

We opted for the manual administration of user accounts and group access as we have just undergone a large upgrade and authentication shift with Mahara and wanted to adjust to the new processes first.

Once the student accounts had been created and added to the course group in Mahara they were all notified by email about their new accounts, a video introduction from the course facilitator and a means of communicating back to the facilitator if they had any issues logging in.

Where the course was concerned, there were 8 pages in total, the first page being an introduction to the course, support models and a light touch approach to answering the question, what is an e-portfolio? After the introduction the students are now into the tasks and activities, weaving the students through the why's and how's of being reflective and using the different tools in Mahara to help facilitate this, such as, the journal tool, the planning tool and finally bringing it all together into an e-portfolio page which they submit to the course group.

After submission, they are introduced to the 'Where next?' page which detailed where students could go to find out more about being reflective or other digital literacies programmes they might find helpful.

The support model consisted of the facilitator monitoring the discussion forums (which were used) and messaging through Mahara, which wasn't used much, students were expected to manage their own time with the tasks and had access to all the content from day one.

I'm pleased to say that 43% (13 Students) of the cohort submitted a brilliant array of portfolios, I was even more happy with the fact students had begun to experiment with other elements, such as adding images and videos even though this was not a task or assessed in any way.

Here are some comments from students about the course:

Student 1:

When I first opened Mahara, I had absolutely no idea where to start, however following the tasks has helped me find how easy it actually is to use. I think that I will use mahara more often[sic] in the future, as it will probably help me de-stress and clear my head a little better.

Student 2:

I wouldn't have used Mahara without the e-Portfolios for the reflective learner course. I found it quite confusing at first and wasn't really sure what was meant by terms such as 'pages' and the different content.

I found working through the main features during the short course very useful, and by understanding the main features, the use of other features became clearer.

Student 3:

This experience has been positive for me as I have been able to understand how to become a more reflective learner in a effective and efficent[sic] way. Furthermore, I have been able to identify my learning style, which has benefit me in identifying what skills I need to develop to improve. Although the experience has been positive I did struggle with getting used to the programme, at which some face to face contact would have been helpful in supporting my learning.

You can infer from the above that some students struggle with simply picking up a system and running with it as I guess we wrongly assume the latest generation of tech savvy students should be able to do. I think the way we guided the students through the 'why' as the first priority helped with this transition. Once a student could see the benefits of using the system and being reflective, they were happy to move forward to the 'how' section.

One of the things we were keen to track was how much time was spent not only facilitating the course and supporting students but also the creation and administration of the course, you can see a rough tally for our online courses here - http://goo.gl/AXUIMk

All 13 students who submitted their portfolios before the end of the course received a Certificate of Achievement for completing the course.

Mahara Upgrade Complete!

Good news everyone! The Mahara Upgrade this morning went well and we are now running a latest stable version of the Mahara e-Portfolio software.

A few notes to users:

If you already had a Mahara account but never logged in, you will need to register for a new account again as all 'Never logged in' users have been removed to help with statistics tracking with current users who use the system.

All UCS staff or students can now register for an account, all you have to do is go to http://mahara.ucs.ac.uk and follow the on-screen instructions.

As we have moved to a new registration model where you can choose your own username, current users who still have an 'S' or 'E' number can change their username by clicking on their 'Settings' option to the top right of the screen when logged in.

If for any reason you have forgotten your password you can have it reset by clicking on the 'Lost username / password' option under the login box. You will then need to put in your username or UCS email address in the format of 'S' number followed by @ucs.ac.uk, e.g - s123456@ucs.ac.uk

Encountered a problem after the upgrade? Email the Elevate Team for support or use the 'Contact Us' option at the bottom of the Mahara page.

Start building your e-Portfolio today by following the link below and registering for an account!

UCS' Mahara e-Portfolio Service - http://mahara.ucs.ac.uk

Mahara Upgrade Tomorrow!

Just a gentle reminder that UCS' e-Portfolio Service Mahara (http://mahara.ucs.ac.uk) will be put into maintenance mode just after midnight tonight (25th Nov) and the service will not be available until midday on the 26th of Nov.

This will mean you will not be able to login, please make sure all work is saved prior to the switch off.

An announcement will be made when the service is back up and running.

Important Mahara Upgrade Update!

Due to unforeseen circumstances our host ULCC will NOT be upgrading our Mahara installation tomorrow as planned. 

This has been rescheduled for next Tuesday, 26th November.

Mahara Upgrade Spotlight - Week 3.. Part 2!

Following from our earlier post about the changes to the portfolio editing section, here is a quick update about some housekeeping, and an a little bonus!

This upgrade, apart from introducing new features and streamlined functions, gives us an opportunity to tidy up the current set of user accounts and settings. Part of this process will be to purge all user accounts that have never logged in.

By default every student at UCS has an account on Mahara, however this model is changing to a self-registration process where staff or students can register for an account if they wish to use the system.

To tidy up any redundant accounts on Mahara we will be deleting any account that has never logged in to the system.

If you are a current student who wishes to use Mahara after the upgrade, instructions will be available on the front page on how to register for an account.

As an added extra for those who do use the system, we will be increasing your upload limit to 250MB, currently users have a set 50MB limit :)

Mahara Upgrade Spotlight - Week 3

Only one more week left until Mahara gets upgraded on Tuesday 19th of November!

In the meantime though we'll have a quick look at how portfolio editing has changed.

The way you create each portfolio page hasn't changed, simply a few interface changes and some streamlining has taken place with the upgrade to make sure the process is and easy one.

Firstly when you used to create a portfolio page in the old version of Mahara the first page you were presented with was the adding of content page, however this left many people with an 'Untitled' page until they changed it. Now with the upgrade, when you create a new portfolio page the Title and Description are the first bits of information you edit. See Figure 1 below

Figure 1

When editing a portfolio page after the upgrade, you will notice that the main menu now persists throughout the editing process, making navigation seamless throughout using Mahara, to make this possible, more room was needed to make the editing space not feel cramped. This has been done by consolidating the portfolio artefacts into a side menu instead of the usual menu in the middle of page, see Figure 2 below.

Figure 2

 The process of dragging and dropping each element you require into your portfolio won't change.

We hope these changes, although small will help streamline the portfolio creation and editing process.

Mahara Upgrade Spotlight - Week 2

Only two weeks until Mahara gets upgraded!

This weeks spotlight we'll have a peek at the new look and feel of Mahara. This time around we have decided to go completely standard with the graphical user interface (GUI). Before we had a UCS branded blue theme as seen in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1

The new upgrade will revert back to what we call a 'Vanilla' theme, basically the default theme the Mahara software comes with, this has several benefits:

1. With it being a standard theme we can utilise already available tutorials and video guides.
2. Alleviate any extra development work when upgrading having to make sure a custom theme still works.
3. Makes moving between potential Mahara systems easier.

Mahara's default theme is green in colour and has the enhanced dropdown menus to aid navigation as seen in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2

As you can see the main menu structure has persisted throughout. We hope this upgrade will bring a slicker and smoother navigation experience.

Upgrading to the latest version also brings with it a new responsive framework which detects the screen size you are accessing the site in and adjusts the layout accordingly. If you were to access the site from a mobile device it will adjust the menu and content to a more easily viewable and manageable size as seen in Figure 3 and 4 below.

Old - Figure 3

New - Figure 4

As you can see from the screenshots above, taken on a mobile device, the current UCS Mahara install on the left (Fig 3) half the content is off the screen, however Figure 4 shows that with the new software content has been adjusted to fit into the screen meaning the user will not have to scroll across the screen to access features.

Mahara Upgrade Spotlight - Week 1

With the upgrade of UCS' Mahara happening on the 19th of November, we have decided to fill the following weeks with updates to what will be changing and highlighting new features.

This week we'll be looking a quite a small change but certainly an important one! Before when you used to click on 'Portfolio' you used to get a submenu when the page loaded and an option called 'Share' which would take you to your sharing page.

With the upgrade this has been made a whole lot easier to navigate, for starters all you need to do is hover over the menu item 'Portfolio' and a dropdown menu will now appear showing you all the available options, of which the usual 'Share' option has now been replaced with two separate options, one being 'Shared by me' and 'Shared with me' as shown in figure 1 below.

Figure 1

This will let you quickly navigate to either option and have a more clearer view of what you have shared and with whom.

The dropdown menus are also another feature that will come with the upgrade, this small but effective update will help streamline the navigation within Mahara.