New E-Portfolio Feature: Institutions
We've upgraded the Mahara e-portfolio server!
New features include:
- Lots of work on usability. In general, using Mahara should be reasonably simple and straight forward to people with a basic knowledge of computers and the internet.
- Devolved administration - each institution in the system can have their own administrators and staff members, leaving the site admin free to manage the overall running of the site.
- Group forums - groups can now have their own forums, in which all group members may post. The forums have moderators, closed/sticky topics, threaded replies and subscriptions.
- Social networking - It's much easier now to find friends and groups, and users' profile pages are greatly improved. All logged in users can see important information about themselves in a new sideblock.
- Heaps of other minor bug fixes and improvements, especially around such areas as database independence, browser support and packagability by distributions.
As you can see, among its the new features is the ability to create multiple institutions. With institutions, we can allow you to segregate and manage your own Mahara users without having to rely on ORVSD staff for simple things like password resets. If you would like to have an institution created for your school or district, please send an e-mail to support@orvsd.org with the name of the institution and the name of the person(s) you'd like to have set as administrators and staff.
Regardless, please give the new version a spin and let us know what you think!
-Greg
