News – studentfolio upgrade & managed hosting move

studentfolio, the University’s e-portfolio tool, will be upgrading to the latest version of the Mahara software on Monday 7th July. At the same time, we are moving the service to managed hosting. We will also take this opportunity to improve the look and feel of studentfolio with a fresh new design.

These developments have been facilitated by Student Services as part of the HEAR (Higher Education Achievement Report) project to provide students with evidence of their graduate attributes and extra-curricular activities. And is closely tied to enhancing student employability using the Graduate Toolkit.

Downtime during the upgrade.

Studentfolio will be unavailable while the upgrade and migration to managed hosting takes place. Please avoid any work you or your students need to complete in studentfolio during this time. The upgrade is provisionally planned to take place on Monday 7th July and studentfolio will be unavailable on this day, and should be considered at risk on the 8th-9th July.

Why the move to managed hosting?

Managed hosting will ensure we can improve the performance of the software, introduce new versions of the software with minimal disruption and accommodate increasing use of the service, as more students build their portfolios.

New features.

The new version of Mahara (1.9) includes a series of interface and feature enhancements that should make it even more user friendly for tutors and students. These include:

• A New content chooser that organises the options for adding content to a page in a more intuitive way and is now re-positioned on the left hand side of the page when editing.
• Column and row layout options for pages allow you customise of the layout in different ways.
• Skins gives users the ability to create their own themes (look and feel) for pages.
• Drag and drop file upload.
• Embed PDF’s in pages
• File attachments for text boxes