Introduction to Mahara

What is Mahara?

MyPortfolio is an online electronic portfolio application based on the popular open-source platform Mahara. It enables users to document their learning journey by collecting evidence of their work, reflecting on their experiences, and demonstrating progress over time.

Mahara can be used to create professional development portfolios, reflective journals, and build a record of learning and achievement.

Our Mahara guides have been developed to provide clear, practical support and help you make the most of the platform's features and capabilities.

Interested in using Mahara? Contact Digital Learning to discuss how ePortfolios can support your teaching.

In this guide:

Features, benefits and FAQs
Using Mahara
Getting started
Accessibility and resources
- Accessibility
- Support and resources

Mahara guides All guides Support & training

Features

Create personalised portfolio pages and collections of pages to organise content
Upload and store a variety of documents, images and media
Control who can access your portfolio through flexible sharing and privacy settings
Receive feedback and comments from tutors and peers

Benefits

Encourages reflective practice and continuous learning
Provides a central space to evidence skills, achievements and professional development
Helps to showcase experience and accomplishments to employers and other audiences
Enables learners to track progress and development over time

FAQs

Can staff use Mahara? Yes. Mahara is available to both staff and students at the Warwick and can be used to create and maintain ePortfolios for teaching, learning, professional development, and showcasing work.
Can students access their ePortfolio after graduating? Yes, for 12 months. After this period, students lose access to their Warwick account. We recommend they export their portfolio before this date is reached.

Using Mahara

How Mahara supports teaching and learning

Ways to use Mahara

ePortfolios support active, reflective learning by enabling users to document and showcase their development throughout their programme.

A Mahara portfolio can contain examples of work, reflections, feedback, videos, images, certificates, and records of extra-curricular activities. Students build a portfolio over time, creating a richer picture of their skills, development, and achievements throughout their programme.

Mahara summarise their ePortfolio platform as somewhere to:

Create - develop your portfolio
Share - control your privacy
Engage - find people and join groups

Some of the ways in which Mahara can be used:

Staff can develop and share templates to help students start to build their portfolios. Students can take more control as they become accustomed to this way of working.
Groups can be used to provide an online space for students and staff to communicate, share, and provide feedback.
Students can be encouraged to evidence learning activity throughout a programme, controlling who they share their content with.
Staff can refer students to publish to the ePortfolio after significant learning tasks, to remind them of what employers would be seeking from a graduate in that subject area.

For example, a student might:

Upload a project report and reflect on what they learned from it.
Collect feedback received on placements or group work.
Record evidence of skills such as teamwork, communication, leadership, or digital literacy.
Create a showcase portfolio to share with personal tutors, placement supervisors, accreditation bodies, or potential employers.

This video produced by Mahara demonstrates why someone might use an ePortfolio.

Using portfolios at Warwick

At Warwick

Mahara has been used:

In Engineering, to replace the traditional paper Logbook kept by students on placement recording risk and constraint issues including but not limited to "general project risks, time, uncertainty, information, data, commercial, environmental, sustainability, health, safety, security, intellectual property rights, standards, risk management".
In Law, to create a reflective portfolio for a project or placement based "on the effort put in to make it work, the skill brought to the implementation of public legal education, the quality of reflection on the experience, and the evaluations of the host organisation and student peers".
In CTE, to record professional development, prompting termly scaffolded reflections on confidence as a practitioner, subject knowledge, professionalism, teacher modelling, behaviour management and other areas of practice.
In Life Sciences, by Dr Katrine Wallis to support the MBio Industry Placement Portfolio programme. Katrine explained how Mahara is used by students as a way of compiling and evidencing their work on placement:

“The MBio Industry programme has successfully used Mahara for several years to support students undertaking remote industry placements. As students work in different organisations, on different projects, and with varying schedules, Mahara provides the flexibility for them to upload evidence of their developing skills throughout the year rather than working to multiple fixed submission dates.

A key benefit of Mahara is its ability to facilitate ongoing dialogue between students and assessors. Students can upload evidence as it becomes available, receive feedback through comments, and refine their portfolio over time. This creates a documented record of both progress and formative feedback, supporting reflection and continuous improvement.

The integration with Moodle has also been valuable, allowing assessors to monitor portfolio activity and review updates efficiently. As with many portfolio-based approaches, the greatest benefits are seen when students engage consistently throughout the year rather than leaving work until the final deadline”.

Some example use cases:

Mahara version 26.04: Key changes and improvements

Mahara 26.04: Key changes and improvements

If you already use Mahara, you will have noticed some changes in the latest version, Mahara 26.04, updated at Warwick in July 2026.

Mahara has introduced a refreshed, modern interface designed to make the platform more intuitive and easier to navigate. Key updates include easy access to everything you need in the left-hand navigation: portfolios, groups, people, and reusable content with a collapsible menu.

The Mahara manual gives an overview of the latest release of Mahara and the short video below covers the highlights and improvements in Mahara 26.04.

Please note the option to record video and audio directly within Mahara is not currently enabled on our site. If you would like to discuss using this feature, please contact the Digital Learning team for further information and support.

Getting started

Logging in to Mahara

Logging in

Accessing Mahara

Mahara uses the same 'single sign on' details as other Warwick services, such as Tabula, email and web pages. The same account is used to access various University systems, websites or platforms making accessing different online services easier.

Mahara is accessed via Moodle, Warwick's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).

Go to Moodle and click Sign in.
Enter your University username (e.g. u1234567) and click Next.
Enter your University password and click Sign in. You’ll be taken to the two-factor authentication screen.
- For more information on this, please visit IDG's Two-step authentication page.
Enter the verification code from your authenticator app or text message, then click Verify.
Choose whether you’d like to stay signed in (Yes or No).
You’ll then be taken to your Moodle dashboard.
On the top row, select the Portfolios tab and choose Mahara.
You will be redirected to your Mahara dashboard.

Troubleshooting

Check your details. See IDG's page on How to log in.
Try logging in to the Warwick website.
If your login does not work there either, try resetting your password via IDG's password reset page.
If you still have trouble, contact the IDG Help Desk who can help you reset your password and troubelshoot login issues:
- Phone: 024 7657 3737
- Email: helpdesk@warwick.ac.uk

New starters – If you’ve just joined the University, your login details may not yet be available in Moodle or Mahara. Please try again the following day.

Visit our guides to get you started with Mahara.

Account settings

Setting up your account preferences

Visit the Mahara manual for further guidance on account preferences.

You can customise your account preferences to control how your account functions and how information is displayed. To access your preferences:

Click your name or the arrow in the top-right corner of your dashboard.
From the drop-down menu, select Settings > Preferences.
Update your preferred settings as required.
Click the green Save button to save your changes.

Preference options

Friends control: choose whether other users can add you as a friend.
- If someone adds you as a friend, they automatically become your friend as well.
- When you remove someone from your friends list, you are also removed from theirs.
Disable email: prevent notifications from being sent to your primary email address.
Message settings: choose how you would like to receive messages from other users.
Multiple journals: by default you have one journal.
- Enable Multiple Journals if you want to organise content into separate journals rather than relying solely on tags.
- Important: Once you create an additional journal, this setting cannot be turned off.
Maximum tags in Cloud: set the maximum number of tags displayed in your tag cloud.
Sort Groups: choose how your groups are displayed, i.e. alphabetical or most recently joined.
Dashboard information: show or hide general site information on your dashboard. This information is configured by the site administrator.
Resize large images on upload: disable or allow resizing of images
Confirm before changing the page layout: this setting only applies to portfolios created before 2018 that have not yet had their layout updated.
Accessible page creation: enable page creation and editing using a screen reader or keyboard. When this option is enabled:
- Drag-and-drop page editing controls are disabled.
- Pages can be edited using keyboard navigation and accessibility tools.

If any of these settings are greyed out, they cannot be changed and have been locked by the site administrator.

Navigate the dashboard

Once you are logged into Mahara, you are directed to your dashboard.

Click on the numbered hotspots below to find out how to navigate the dashboard basics.

For detailed guidance, visit Mahara's manual on navigating the dashboard.

Setting up your personal profile

Personalising your profile

The profile page is the only information in Mahara that is visible to all other users by default.

Visit Mahara's detailed guidance on setting up your personal profile.

Click on the numbered hotspots below to find out how to personalise your profile and edit your profile page.

Accessibility and resources

Accessibility

Accessibility in Mahara

Mahara aims to be usable by as many individuals as possible, including those with disabilities or special needs. Creating accessible web content is a requirement in many countries, hence the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were created. There are three conformance levels under the WCAG 2, the latest edition of the guidelines: A, AA, and AAA. Each level requires conformance with lower levels and includes its own specific guidelines for how websites should be made accessible.

Mahara is mostly at WGAC level AA for portfolio and collaboration areas of the system. The administration of Mahara is predominantly on level AA as well.

In Mahara 26.04 several accessibility improvements have been made that contribute to WCAG 2.2:

more consistent navigation cross overview pages,
tables on overview pages are only scrollable vertically instead of vertically and horizontally,
more consistent use of button classes and styling and labels,
more plain English language and consolidation of information.

View the Mahara manual for full accessibility information.

Support and resources

If you would like to learn more about Mahara and explore examples of its use in teaching, learning, and assessment, the following resources may be helpful:

Mahara Community YouTube channel – official videos covering platform updates, new features, release highlights, and examples of Mahara in practice.
Mahara User Manual – comprehensive documentation covering Mahara's features, guidance for users and administrators, and information on the latest releases (current version 26.04 as at July 2026).
Mahara AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions - if you work with Mahara, be that as learning designer, teacher, instructor, support staff, or developer, join a Mahara AMA session, where the Mahara project team is available for a chat. These monthly Mahara AMA alternate time wise to make it possible for people from different parts of the world to participate live. Bring your questions and ideas for Mahara to discuss.
Create. Share. Engage - the official podcast bringing you information on portfolios for learning and more.
Dublin City University: Mahara Assessment examples – a collection of case studies and examples demonstrating how Mahara can be used to support assessment, reflection, and portfolio-based learning across a range of disciplines.
JISC publication on Effective Practice with e-Portfolios.
Dr Helen Chen, University of Stanford gives an excellent explanation of portfolios and their uses in this video an introduction to learning portfolios.
The paper "Course implementation of Mahara e-portfolio: university students’ perspective" investigates findings from students using Mahara as part of a compulsory elective course. This paper will be useful to anyone considering implementation of e-portfolios into their teaching and learning.

Digital Learning support

We hope you found what you were looking for in these guides, but if not please rest assured help is still at hand. Please contact us at helpdesk@warwick.ac.uk.