Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a ‘What’s New in Version 25.04’ demo facilitated by Mahara, Project Lead, and fellow Catalyst IT colleague Kristina Hoeppner. I always try to attend these sessions as it’s great to see what new features and updates will be made available in an upcoming release, but also to see the sorts of questions the attendees ask in the comments.
What’s New in Mahara 25.04
The main focus of Mahara
The new release, due out at the end of April 2025, focuses on three main areas:
- Responding to community consultation feedback
- Getting ready for the UX changes coming in version 26.04
- Implementing new admin and portfolio features
What to expect (with links to the tracker items)
- New Icons
Mahara are moving away from Font Awesome to use Material symbols that offer more choice. - CPD Experiences feature
Enhancing the CPD block to have more fields for inputting data, as well as a reflection area. This is in addition to giving Administrators the ability to create categories of CPD experience to log time against, resulting in progress bars when a minimum bank of time is specified. - Combining the Image and Gallery blocks into one
This will make the creation of templates much easier, as well as giving portfolio owners the option of how many images to display. - Self Assessment block
Another great addition for those who create templates – this compliments the existing peer assessment block, allowing students to add their own assessment to a portfolio page. - Ability to report the site is unavailable message to the Mahara team
This message will often pop up to those who encounter a bug. As of version 24.04, if configured they can report it to a site admin, however in the next version site admins will be able to then pass it on to a specific team for further investigation. - Custom maintenance message
Quite self-explanitary. You can now add your own message to display to people when placing your site into maintenance mode
My Key Takeaway from Mahara 25.04
The above is just a short list of the features and changes that will be coming, but I wanted to highlight one of them that I’m most excited by! Back in the late ‘naughties’ and early 2010s I was supporting a number of degree programmes on the use of Mahara to log and record experiences; Sports Coaching to log time spent with clients, PR and Communication to record skills developed during work experience, Architectural Technology to record outcomes of live briefs.
To make the above happen I had to work with the lecturers to design example portfolios for the learners to use as inspiration, and to develop activities to drip feed into the schemes of work to avoid overwhelming first-time users. These portfolios needed to utilise a number of separate blocks such as the Journal tool, Image gallery, and the CPD plugin, as well as your usual text and media blocks.
Now with the enhanced CPD Experiences tool, learners only have to use one area to record the types of activities to show their growth and development, which can be easily created in a template.
Below is an example of how this can look and work in the new version of Mahara:
From the above, you can see how neatly it looks, all contained in one activity, that can then be expanded to review the details. You can then edit and add more content to it when in edit mode. You can see the page itself in the Mahara dev environment (note – I do not own the site, so the content this link takes you to may be removed at any moment).
I believe this, when combined with the ability to log experiences against categories, resulting in graphs to show progress, is a really strong step in the right direction for Mahara. Learners want tools to easily show off their progress, and teachers and assessors want ways to review it all at a glance, taking deep dives when needed.
I’m very much looking forward to seeing how our Mahara partner institutions adopt this new feature when we upgrade them all to the newest version this summer, and hope to connect with those who do at future events.
Watch the ‘What’s New in Mahara 25.04’ webinar to explore the new features in detail:
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