hello this is Christina hopner from the Maha project in today's video I'd like to show you a number of the new features that we will be having in mahada 244 which will be released at the end of April we have made a preview version available from mahada 2404 so that you can install the new version and uh test it out on your own infrastructure or you can also use it on our development site def. maha. org where you can test out most features for which you do not need a site administrator access so I'm really excited to show you these new features there will be a shorter uh feature release video and I will also have sessions for to introduce to new features but um in preparation for your hope hopefully you're going to test mahada 244 in our pre version I wanted to give you a quick overview of uh some of the highlights of the new release is to make it easier for you to test them so this is going to be a bit of a longer video in comparison to the short feature release videos because I am going to just step through the functionality one by one and that then also gives you the possibility to see where things are being added how they are being enabled and so on before I then also um add that information into the mahada menual so hopefully by the end of the month the menual will be mostly complete with all of those new functionalities here you can see our Mah issue and wish list item tracker which is available to all subscribers and I have filtered for the Milestone 244.
00 so the first release of mahada 244 and the label enhancement importantly here is that you either choose the tab closed or all because of um how our workflow works all the things that are now going to be in Maha 2404 these issues have been closed you can still report and bus for them if there were any um by clicking the new issue icon and then filling in the information with as as much information as possible so that we can replicate the issues I'm not going to show you all 38 new features that we have implemented but um have a select View and I already showed you a couple of features by videos so I will make sure to link those uh so that you can take a look look at those uh on your own time and so today I'm going to focus on some of the administrative features and also new portfolio features that are available so let's get started so often when you have a mahada site your students or staff might be doing something on the site and then they come across the error message mahada site unavailable and non-recoverable error occurred this probably means you encountered a back in the system this is in in a way a placeholder error message to prevent that we display too much information potentially publicly therefore potentially exposing your security vulnerability so this is not an actual error message that you need to report to us because we would always come back to you and ask for more details because this one only says that there is a bug so what we have implemented and that is also part of um one of our roadmap items is that your students and staff can now send you that bug report and you can engage with them to ask them for more information in order to do so um as administrator what you would do is um set your notif ifications to receive issue reports so at least one side administrator needs to have that set in order to receive issue reports we have not made that a general setting for allite administrators because you might want to only have one person who receives the reports and deal with deals with them to make it easier to know who has actually been looking at after them rather than just have them as sent to everybody because again potentially um sensitive information might be disclosed in those error messages now what you can also do especially if you have a multi-tenanted site and um you want to give the institution administrators the the first pass through then you can also allow institution administrators to see issue report reports in order to do that you go to the site options and site settings and then institution administrators receive issue reports set this option to yes and then similarly to what I've done for the site administrator they can go to their settings into the notification settings and decide how they would like to receive those issue reports e either via email email digest or in the inbox per default it is always said to none so now if that student were to encounter this bu again they now don't just see the error me or the the placeholder error message that there is a problem but they can report that problem to you they do not in this case at this stage see the details uh of the error message uh they are only revealed to you so now they can type what they had been doing be um in order to come to this error and send this off to an administrator now if I go into my notifications I can see that Paula has sent me an issue report steps taken before encountering the issue 1 2 3 4 and then where the error occurred and so now I as administrator can see the the problem line and also the call stti so all that information that a developer might need in order to resolve the problem if Paula had not provided enough information I could go back to her reply and ask for more information on it so that I have a better idea of how to replicate this problem now since we are in the preview version testing time of mahara it would actually be really useful if you installed mahara on a testing environment and did not have to wait until somebody sends you such an error message but could see error messages directly on screen in order to do that what you can do in your cont PHP file is to include this line uh that says that production mode is false and by putting that into your config PHP and saving that file when I refresh this page I now have this site is not in production mode displayed at the top some data may be out of date and so if I now go in as my student and view that exact same error I now do see it directly here on my screen and that makes it easy to copy and paste as well but this should really only be used when you're testing and not have that setting turned on in production mode so that you don't see all of those extra messages info messages and also error messages however for testing it is pretty good to have available another ad administrative feature that might be of interest to you is uh now that we do have the subscriptions that you can see how many people have been active on your site over the past year and there are two ways of seeing that the first one is directly on the interface that you go into the report section and then on the left hand side there you have the overview you see the number of active account holders today in the last week and we included in the past year so that is always for the last 365 days and then how many were active all together and so active means that they will have logged in at least once in this case there is no differentiation whether they've just been browsing around or whether they've actually created some content or uploaded uh some some files now if you want to have a more direct view of what they have been doing on the site and whether they created some content you can use a command line interface script for that and so that script and I will put the the line that would need to be used of course into the mahada manual and that script uh is in the normal CLE folder and you can there uh and there you can decide on the interval so whether it is one year half a year two years 5 years therefore also getting a good overview if there are any older accounts that you might want to remove for example if you automatically created accounts and people really haven't been using your site now if I run this file now then I can see that on this site even though I have altogether eight Accounts at the moment that only two have been active in the past year and that is because it's a new testing site with all data I can see their username the last login and this script really only show shows me people who have logged in during that uh specified interval and it also shows me whether they only have default Pages whether they created any new artifacts in that time interval whether they created any new portfolios whether they join groups and also what their quota is so here looking at Paula um she doesn't just have default pages and default pages are your dashboard and your profile page and similarly also Anna doesn't have any um has more than those two pages but only Paula created new artifacts in the interval Anna hasn't done that and also only Paula created new portfolios during that time interval Anna has only logged in and looked around and as you saw earlier uh changed some settings on the site they both have joined groups though um and Paula has a much higher quarter used than Anna the quarter here is displayed in bites as a most UN Universal Display um so that you can also perform calculations if needed so that is how you can also very quickly see how active some people have been for very rudimentary information um if you needed to check for example um how many people you have that logged in from M but haven't really done any on the site if you wanted to have a report like that now let's go to more portfolio features away from the administrative site many organizations in the past have been using the continuing professional development plugin CPD and um that's why we've decided to and thanks also to funding through one of our clients here in New Zealand uh that's why we've decided to move that directly into mahada because it is a very useful plugin if you have an upgraded site um you will need to activate that plugin specifically it is not automatically um installed in order to do that you can go to the administration menu extensions plug-in Administration and then scroll down until you see the CPD plug-in make that a first the artifact and then also the block type now that these have been activated they are available and accessible to everybody on the site through the main menu so in the CPD activities you um you will set up activities as pretty much as a running list so click the new activity button and then you can give your activity a title you can give it a location a start date that you select and you can also give it an end date and there can also be a description now the start date is very important and that is Al that's also why it is a required field um but the other factor that you do want to consider here is really working with Texs because what the CPD block allows you to do is um to limit the display of the activities based either on a date or a tag or a comb or Tex and or a combination of all of them so um say something like CPD 2024 and then you would give it some hours and that is always in decimals and once you've entered a bunch of those activities you will see um what that display looks like I can leave the description free um but can start my CPD and here you see that the hours are automatically counted for you and totaled now I'm ready to put that block onto a page so I go to my portfolios and let me create a new page for that I can pull the block over find the CPD and now I have the possibility to uh filter by Texs so I choose the CPD 20241 for example and I can also decide on the date range that I want to display or I can leave that empty so here for the dates from and to are both start dates that are being displayed uh so that we always go by the start of the activities in case somebody for example um has a CPD that are longer than just a day or a week and they need to document all the cpds of a year that they have started with in their particular recertification year for example now that I have that I can save that and as you can see I have a whole lot of buttons here so that I can immediately update my CPD activity from this screen without needing to go back into the main menu I can also delete the activities or I can add more activities again directly from my portfolio screen making it really comfortable to do that the other Improvement that we've made uh compared to the plug-in is that when you have the details mode turned on like I have here and you're in The View mode of the page you can also quickly update your CPD without needing to go into edit mode and potentially moving blocks around or deleting things and such so that there's less room for error so you can can add an activity you can update an activity delete an activity or also um select whether you want to add some more text or a particular time frame so this CPD activity is now very very versatile and can be used without needing the old plug-in and we've also updated it so that it does take newer functionality of mahada in account namely that inline editing now when we were here in edit mode you would would have already seen when I added a block onto this page that recent content types were displayed this is the case uh because that is also a new functionality where you can see which content types you have used recently either on that page or across also your portfolio entirely making it very quick to select your most used content items based on your own usage because an administrator can always um decide on the general order of the blocks so that is happening in the plug-in Administration when you go to block typ uh plugin type block type click that icon then you decide in which order these content types should be displayed however that might not be the content types that you're using uh predominantly therefore those recent content types make it very easy for you to use your most used items in Maha 2304 we introduced the functionality that when you make a submission you're not actually submitting the portfolio but a copy of a portfolio and so it um also necessitated that we manage that a bit better better and so when you are on your portfolios overview page you have see the option to show submitted portfolios so if you work quite extensively with portfolios for assessment or might make several submissions not showing all of these submitted portfolios will be good so that you don't accidentally try to um edit one of those copies or wonder why you rather why you can't edit them however in some cases it might be good um for you to always show those submitted portfolios so you could already in the past click the uh click the checkbox and then click search and then all your submitted portfolios would be displayed however what is different now is uh that this option is sticky so when you go back to your portfolio overview page it is still ticked so that you don't always have to take that option so that is now there until you untick it again and then your submitted portfolios won't be visible a feature that needs to be activated in the config PHP file because it currently is an experimental feature is that you can allow the copying of blocks on an existing page so that is a config setting set that to true and once you have done that and you open a page and go into edit mode you will see a copy button so that you could very quickly make copies of that same block that could be used especially when you want to create templates and only make minor changes in the content of the blocks that you create it is an experimental setting at the moment because we do want to find out more if that were a feature that people would like to use a lot um and also gather more info about um whether it is only for template creation or whether students or staff creating portfolios would also want to use that functionality um in order to help us to decide what the final implementation of this could look like artificial intelligence remains a a Hot Topic that is widely discussed and also comes into the portfolio space more and more for various reasons so we want to explore the possibilities of how artificial intelligence can help in the portfolio creation evaluation and uh maintenance process there are a number of projects run in Germany that we are following very closely and will also uh catch up with them over the coming months and share more of what they are doing within the community um one very quick window was that we have been looking at riff which is a reflection bot that allows you to have a or that allows a teacher to create a pumpt give some context and then students can answer that pumpt and so what we have done is made it simple for teachers to embed such a bot into a portfolio page at the moment it is the embedding of that bot so that you can add that into a template for example making it very easy for students to always come back and start their reflection there is no integration in regards to us um or your your Maha side immediately saving the data that is being displayed via riff or saving the summary that comes through the bot that is all separate it is at the moment an ifame to make it easy to start interacting with the software the service is also an external service so please do review the terms and conditions and the Privacy statement in order to know whether that is something that you would like to explore is created by Drletia prto cavano at Stanford University she works at the D school and is a researcher in reflective practice therefore having lots and lots of experience around reflection and reflection prompts and reflection practice which have all FL uh flown into the creation of this reflection bot now if you do want to give it a go uh join the weight list and you will gain access to riff so that you can set up your own uh reflection bot uh the URL that is given to you is a very short one um and so in order to add it into a mahada page you do need to go to the web page so that a longer URL with an actual token comes out uh rather than just a short URL and then you can grab that token and and add it into the external media block s URL you don't need any embed code uh just that URL because it's not actual iframe code uh that is given to you by the bot and when you view it you have the bot directly available and can start interacting with it so any data that is input here is not saved in mahada directly but needs uh can be sent or the bot can send the data through or the bot can write a summary that is then sent to an email so anybody using it needs to be aware that they should follow those um settings because all we provide is that iframe here but I definitely love to hear if anyone of you is using this it using it is experimenting with it uh what functionality might be missing for those who want to use a reflection bot like riff in their portfolio practice from within a portfolio one last feature that I want to share with you is an accessibility feature and that is a feature that turns mahada pages into dark Pages uh because we implemented a dark mode now the dark mode is an experimental feature because there's a lot of changes that need to be made um even though bootst strip now supports it they are also still in the beginning stages of supporting it and so we've only enabled it on the Raw theme and on the default theme for the time being in order to go into dark mode if you typically already use St mode you don't actually have to do anything in your browser because Maha picks up the browser a setting um since I typically don't use dark mode I go into my settings for my browser and under the website appearance in Firefox I select dark and by having done that automatically my mahada site switches into dark mode so that everything that used to be white is now black and all the menus are changed and I can navigate in in dark mode so if that is your preferred way of viewing websites you now have that option if you're using the site in the raw or the default themes to see that again we would very much like to have feedback from you also if there are certain things that are not quite working because some of course there are lots of elements that needed to be defined and redefined to work in dark mode so that we are now often doubling up on uh some of the variables so that we have one for light mode and one for dark mode if there's not the possibility to handle that with one variable so please do get in touch a filing issue if you come across uh certain things that affect this doc mode or even if you're continuing to use the site in uh light mode in the reg regular mode and suddenly you feel like oh this this used to look different than before then it could very well be that uh a change was introduced due to dark mode and therefore send us through an issue and we will look into fixing it so now that we've seen a number of the or small number actually of the new features um and I have not shown you two of um another two big ones because I had already done videos on them so uh smart evidence version two has its own video where it is now possible to have multiple people as assessors and also self assessment and where you also have a fifth assessment status that already has its own video so please take a look at that and also the recycle bin already has its own video so you can take a look at those separately there are a number of other uh features that are more technical technically oriented that I'm not showing you uh showing you here but if you're interested in them please do check them out from our list of new features and give them a go and if you have any questions please be in touch So the plan now is for the rest of the month that we are doing uh release testing uh testing the preview version and we'd very much like to invite you to do the same because of course your data is different from the data that we have therefore you might run into issues or interesting bits and pieces that we might not see during our testing um you would also be on a different hosting environment um and might be using different versions from what we are using so please uh give it a good test um mahara 244 supports PHP 8. 1 and it also requires PHP 8 um we are also testing the site with PHP 8. 2 um and if your server infrastructure is on PHP 8.
2 please give it a world there and let us know of any issues we haven't seen any very obvious breaking issues at the stage and therefore are hopeful that uh we can make a good assessment about the compatibility with PHP 8. 2 once it comes to the release uh date right now we are looking into releasing uh latest on the 26th of April and therefore would appreciate if you send us any reports through of issues that you might encounter um by the end of the previous week which would be um April 19th or even Monday April the 2 second um so that we can decide whether these are things that we can still fix for the release or whether they would need to come out in a minor Point release after the official um first point0 release if you don't have a test site of um on for yourself or for your site or can't upgrade a test site at the state you can use our developer environment uh def. ada.
