Creating an electronic portfolio in Mahara

Mahara is at https://mahara.ut.ee. 

At the University of Tartu, the Mahara environment (https://mahara.ut.ee) is used for electronic portfolios. Employees and students of the University of Tartu can log in to Mahara with the username and password of the UT computer network or via an online course. 

An electronic portfolio or a digital development portfolio is an electronic environment (usually web-based) for recording one’s formal and informal learning and professional development based on the works one has collected, published and reflected on as well as feedback from other learners, teachers and supervisors. An electronic portfolio aims to support the students’ self-reflection to outline their strengths, uniqueness and skills obtained in the course of studies. It also helps the students to clarify their goals, (study) needs and expectations, monitor their own progress, express originality and creativity. 

With Mahara, you can create pages, keep a diary, build a CV, aggregate pages under different collections and submit them for evaluation. If you wish, you can make your electronic portfolio (collection) visible only to the persons you choose. Electronic portfolios may contain text, images, audio and video clips, and other materials (e.g. document files). 

There are different types of electronic portfolios: 

• work portfolio – all the material collected over a period of study or during the completion of a task (starting from concept notes, the process, sketches until the final result) 
• presentation portfolio – the learner chooses the best from among all works completed 
• learner’s development portfolio – works that best represent the learner’s development over a longer period 
• thematic portfolio – materials about one topic 

The lecturer of the course will let you know the expected structure and content of the electronic portfolio. 

Your Mahara account will expire after your UT account is inactivated after graduating from the university. So, before graduating, we advise you to save your electronic portfolio in your personal computer, so that you could use it in the future. If necessary, ask the IT helpdesk of the UT (arvutiabi@ut.ee) to keep your UT account active for longer. 

Guidelines 

Mahara: https://sisu.ut.ee/juhendid/mahara-0 

Contacts and support 

If you have technical issues or questions, contact the instructional designer of your faculty (see https://ut.ee/en/academic-developers-instructional-designers) or send an email to eope@ut.ee. In matters of the content and organisation of the course, contact the lecturer of the course.