What is an e-Portfolio?
- An e-Portfolio is a collection of your reflections and experiences held together in one place online.
- Its purpose is to demonstrate your learning, skills, development and to record your achievements over time.
Mahara is a tool used to build and display your e-Portfolio.
You can choose to share your e-Portfolio with different audiences. For example you could create:
- a page for your tutor, for assessment which includes reflection
- a page to showcase your best pieces of work and your CV for potential employers etc.
A single page or a collection of pages can make up your portfolio.
What do I include in my e-Portfolio?
Files, images, videos etc. are known as 'artefacts' within Mahara.
- Imagine you have collected all your 'artefacts' in a box
- Whenever you have a new 'artefact', you add it to the box
- When you are ready to create your portfolio, you take a look at the 'artefacts' in the box and choose the ones you want to make available on a portfolio page
- You can then add and arrange the 'artefacts' on a page or on different pages.
What will I gain from using Mahara?
The Mahara ePortfolio tool will give you a structure for:
- Collecting evidence of your learning, skills and development
- Identifying goals what are you doing now, what do you want to do, how will you achieve this? Questions which will enable you to develop short and long term aims
- Reflecting on your achievements so you can see progress and learn from your experiences
- Organising your work and reflection, enabling you to showcase your achievements and experience
- Sharing your portfolio of evidence with friends, tutors, future employers, external contacts etc. to gain feedback or demonstrate your experience.