About Mahara
First established in mid 2006, the Mahara project started as a collaborative venture funded by New Zealand's Tertiary Education Commission's e-learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF), involving Massey University, Auckland University of Technology, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, and Victoria University of Wellington.
Since July 2007, Richard Wyles from Flexible Learning Network has guided the development of Mahara with open source software specialists - Catalyst IT as the maintainers of the core code.
A first guiding principle with the development of the Mahara e-portfolio system is that it is learner centered - a form of Personal Learning Environment. This is in contrast to the more institution-centric Learning Management System (LMS).
Mahara is a stand-alone system that can be integrated into a wider virtual learning framework. Mahara's architecture is inspired by the modular, extensible architecture of Moodle. Mahara systems can be networked together as well as having single sign-on with Moodle 1.9. In a sense, we see Mahara as a 'sister' application although the two systems are not required to go together.
Going forward, Mahara will continue to evolve as a 'pluggable', modular e-portfolio system designed to leverage Web 2.0 web services and built with interoperability in mind.
BlogAnywhere
BlogAnywhere are an official Mahara Partner and have been selected by Mahara to represent them in the UK offering a full range of services