USQ Mahara ePortfolio
How to get started with your ePortfolio: a practical approach
Overwhelmed? Confused? Not sure where to start?
Read this document!
This document is designed to help get you familiar with the Mahara ePortfolio interface.
This is not a definitive guide to getting started with your ePortfolio; it is simply a strategy you can use to
begin working on your ePortfolio, for you to get used to how the Mahara ePortfolio platform works.
Contents
Step 1: Go to ePortfolio and login ................................................................................................... 2
Step 2: Change some Settings to help you edit better ..................................................................... 4
Step 3: Add some information to your Profile ................................................................................... 6
Step 4: Add a Profile picture .......................................................................................................... 9
Step 5: Uploading and organising files in your Files area ................................................................ 14
Step 6: Creating more than one Journal (Blog) ............................................................................... 20
Step 7: Filling out your Résumé Fields ........................................................................................... 23
Step 8: Working on your first page – customise/personalise your default profile page ......................... 27
Extension activity 1: Creating a page (and then two more for practice) ........................................... 32
Extension activity 2: Create a collection of those pages ................................................................ 38
Extension activity 3: Copy a collection ........................................................................................ 42
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Step 1: Go to ePortfolio and login
1. It is recommended that you use the latest version of your chosen browser. Firefox has the
best interoperability with Mahara, the ePortfolio platform that USQ has chosen to use. First of all,
go to the USQ ePortfolio site <https://eportfolio.usq.edu.au/>.
2. Login using your UConnect username and password. You will arrive at your Dashboard page.
(You may receive an email from ePortfolio that your account has been setup.)
3. Your Dashboard is your homepage where you can see the latest activity of yourself and other
users on Mahara.
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4. Below you can see the general areas of how your dashboard is divided:
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Step 2: Change some Settings to help you edit better
1. In the upper right-hand corner you can see your Name, Settings, your Inbox and Logout:
2. Click on Settings.
3. You will see the following:
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4. You are now going to select three check boxes, which are:

HTML editor

Show controls to add and remove columns when editing a page

Enable multiple journals
HTML editor means you see the formatting toolbar (e.g. bold, italic, underline, etc.)
whenever you go in and edit text in text boxes.
Show controls to add and remove columns when editing a page can make it much easier
for you to add and delete columns when editing your pages. You will still need to go into Edit
layout to change the width of columns, though:
Enable multiple journals means that you can have more than one journal (aka blog), for
example, you could have a journal per subject with multiple entries in each.
5. Click on the Save button at the bottom. You will see a Preferences saved message with a green
tick next to it.
6. On your navigation menu, click on Content.
7. This will take you to your Profile page.
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Step 3: Add some information to your Profile
1. On the first page you come to after you have clicked on Content, you will see Profile.
2. On the About me tab, scroll down a little and fill in your Display Name with what you want to
display:
3. It’s a good idea to use your correct name for your Display name. If you are using your portfolio
for professional purposes, it’s not really a good idea to have a nick-name or offensive words for
your Display name.
4. In the Introduction, add a short paragraph introducing yourself. You might want to include things
such as (these are not in any given order):

Your name

If you’re studying at the moment, what it is you’re studying

Where you grew up

Your strengths

Future goals

Important events that have occurred in your life…
5. When you are done, click on the Save profile button.
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6. Now, click on the Contact information tab:
7. Just start off by filling in your Postal address, Town and Country.
8. You can always go back later and fill out the rest of the information.
9. When finished filling out the information you want to appear, click on the Save profile button at
the bottom.
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10. Now click on the Messaging tab:
11. Here you can fill out any Instant Messaging / Chat Identities. This is purely optional.
Be aware that some of these are no longer available, for example MSN Chat is now redundant,
MSN now own Skype and use the chat functionality of that.
12. When finished filling out the information you want to appear, click on the Save profile button.
13. Now click on the General tab:
14. Here you can fill out your occupation and/or industry you are in. This is optional.
15. When finished filling out the information you want to appear, click on the Save profile button.
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Step 4: Add a Profile picture
In your USQ Mahara ePortfolio, your profile picture may be a picture of yourself or an avatar image of
your choice. You can have up to 5 profile pictures, for different uses. It really helps to personalise
your ePortfolio.
Ideally, your profile pictures are square.
The recommended size of your profile pictures is 100×100 pixels.
The pictures you use must be between 16×16 pixels and 1024×1024 pixels.
It is recommended that you use an image editor to reduce the dimension of your photo
before uploading it to ePortfolio.
1. First, before you add your Profile picture, try to find a clear image of yourself. Remember this
ePortfolio is about you!
Try to have the image cropped to a square as well.
Why? You ask – because when you add a rectangular image into a square space, it gets squashed!
For example, this image below is rectangular, and not the best type of image to use, because it
doesn’t focus on any one person:
Normal:
When made into a square, it gets distorted:
This image below is a slight improvement, but still a bit too blurry (pixelated):
This one is better, as it is much clearer:
2. You can very easily open your image in any one of the following programs to crop (and resize)
your image:

Microsoft Paint on Windows or Paintbrush on Mac

Microsoft Office Picture Manager on Windows or iPhoto on Mac

GIMP (available Windows, Mac & Linux – a more fully featured image editor)
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3. You can upload up to five profile pictures here and choose one to be displayed as your default
picture at any one time. Your pictures must be between 16×16 and 1024×1024 pixels in size.
Usually a good size is 200×200 pixels, as the file size is quite small and this allows the picture to
still be clear.
4. Now, let’s get to uploading your image!
5. When you first log in you may see the following:
6. You can see the generic Profile picture placeholder image, which is what will be replaced with
your personal Profile picture:
7. From your Dashboard, click on the Content tab:
8. Click on the Profile pictures sub-menu item:
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9. You will see the following:
10. Click on the button that says Browse… (Or Choose file, depending on your browser). You can
then navigate to where your picture is and select it:
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11. In the Image title box, give your image a title, which is generally your name. To upload the
image, click on the Upload button:
12. If you don’t have any other images in your files area, as soon as you upload your profile image,
Mahara will create an images folder for you. When you have uploaded your profile picture, you will
receive a Your profile picture has been uploaded to your 'images' folder message along with
a green tick:
13. To enable your profile picture, select the Default radio button, and then click the Set default
button:
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14. You will receive a Default profile picture set successfully message along with a green tick.
Your profile picture should immediately appear next to your name:
Don’t panic if your image doesn’t change immediately. It may take a few minutes to appear,
depending on how busy the server is.
15. As you can see there has been a second profile image uploaded:
16. You can delete profile images by selecting them with the check box and pressing the Delete
selected profile pictures button:
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Step 5: Uploading and organising files in your Files area
In this ‘How to’ we will first upload files and then organise them into folders, although it doesn’t
really matter which is done first, as you can move files and folders without having to re-link them in
the pages where you use them. Renaming files and folders (within Mahara ePortfolio) will not have a
negative impact on links.
Uploading files
1. On your Dashboard, go to the Content tab
2. On the Content tab, go to the Files sub-tab
3. You will see a Home directory, where, if you have uploaded a Profile picture, there may be a
folder called images:
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4. To upload a file, select the Upload file checkbox (please ensure the file is your own or you have
permission to upload it), it will then allow you to upload the file from your computer.
5. Click on Browse… and navigate to the file you want to upload:
Select the file (in this example file_name.docx), then click on the Open button.
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6. A green tick should appear saying that your file upload is complete:
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Organising your files
When you have several different file types, you can easily organise them, to make it easier for you to
find them.
1. On your Dashboard, go to the Content tab
2. On the Content tab, go to the Files tab
3. You will see the Home directory, and the images folder. You might have a large amount of files,
and different file types:
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4. There are images, videos and documents in the Home directory.
It looks a bit messy, so to tidy it up, the files will be organised by type.
You can organize them however you want – by subject, topic, interest, etc.
To do this in the text box above the Home directory symbol type in a file name, for example,
videos, then click on the Create folder button:
5. You will then see a folder called videos appear:
6. There are three images in the Home directory: Chrysanthemum.jpg, Desert.jpg and
Tulips.jpg.
I want to move them into the images directory.
7. To do this, hover hold your mouse cursor over the image icon in front of the file name and a cross
pointer should appear over it:
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8. Then left-mouse-click and hold and then drag the item to the folder (you will see a grey square
appear over the folder) and let go:
9. The file will now be in the images directory.
10. These steps are then repeated for the remaining file types:
11. If you go into one of the folders by clicking on it (in this case, documents), you can see the
breadcrumb trail of the folder structure:
To get back up to the home directory, click on Home, or navigate back up with the arrow:
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Step 6: Creating more than one Journal (Blog)
1. You can use multiple journals (blogs) for different purposes. You might keep a personal
journal, a tech journal, a journal of your artworks or performances, or you might have a journal for
every subject you study.
2. The default is that every user has one journal available; however, if you wish to use more than one
journal, you can go to your Settings.
3. In Step 2 you have already enabled multiple journals, you can now go straight to creating them:
4. You will need to fill out the Journal Settings, and then click on the Create journal button:
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5. Here you can see there is one Journal with zero entries. To make a new entry, click on the New
entry button:
6. Fill out your journal entry, ensuring you have at least filled out the Title and the Entry (required
field). You can add Tags, Allow comments and even add a file as an Attachment. If you are not
ready to publish your journal entry you can even set it as a Draft to publish it later.
7. When you have finished editing your entry, click on the Save entry button.
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8. You can see there is now a single journal entry saved:
9. You can go back to the top level of Journals by clicking on the Journals tab:
10. Follow the previous steps to create a new journal for another topic/subject area.
11. You can see that there are now three different Journals, with different target audiences, each
with their own entries:
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Step 7: Filling out your Résumé Fields
Click on Résumé underneath the Content menu:
The first tab is the Introduction tab:
1. Here you can type in a generic Cover letter as well as your Personal information:
2. The Cover letter section allows you to create a message for those users reviewing your résumé.
Using the HTML editor you can format the cover letter as required.
3. The Personal information section allows you to add in personal information such as date of birth,
place of birth, gender… etc.
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The second tab is Education & Employment:
1. Here you can add in information about your Education history and Employment history:
2. To add information about your Education history click on the Add button:
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3. The two most important fields are the Start date and Institution. Fill out the rest of the fields as
you see fit, then click on the Save button:
4. Click on the Add button for Employment history:
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5. The three most important fields are the Start date, Employer and Job Title. Fill out the rest of
the fields as you see fit, then click on the Save button:
6. Add two more Education items and then Add two more Employment items:
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Step 8: Working on your first page – customise/personalise your default
profile page
Your default profile page is visible to other users on Mahara by default.
1. Your default profile page looks something like this:
Your default profile page can be edited and the layout changed like any other page you have
created.
2. To start with, it’s a good idea to roughly sketch out ideas for layouts of your Profile page:
It is good practice to sketch out ideas for layouts for any of your pages – that way you have
an idea of what your page will look like before you start work.
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3. For demonstration purposes we are going to choose a basic two-column layout (this can always
be changed later):
4. To edit your default profile page click on the Portfolio tab:
5. Click on the Profile page Edit content and layout button:
Note: You cannot change the title of your Profile page.
6. Ensure that your page layout is set to two columns by clicking on the Edit layout tab:
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7. Select 2 columns, Equal widths radio button then scroll down and click on the Save button:
8. You will receive a Page layout changed message along with a green tick:
9. Start by removing the existing blocks:
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10. You will be left with a blank page:
11. Start re-building your page by dragging down the blocks you want to display:
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12. When you are happy with the Layout, then you can either leave the page plain, or you can
choose a theme:
13. With this one, Ultima theme will be chosen, scroll to the bottom and click on the Done button,
and the page will go back to your Portfolio > Pages area.
14. Click on the Profile page link to take you to your finished default profile page:
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Extension activity 1: Creating a page (and then two more for practice)
If all of your pages are in collections, they will not turn up as individual pages in the
Share tab of the Portfolio tab.
In other words, if a page is within a collection, you cannot share that page individually
unless you create a new standalone version of that page.
In your USQ Mahara ePortfolio, you can create Pages that contain the artefacts (also known as
assets) you have uploaded. These pages can be arranged and presented in any configuration you wish.
You can insert artefacts such as: document files; résumé or CV details; text; journal (blog); posts; video
and audio files and RSS feeds to external blogs.
1. From your Dashboard, go to the Portfolio tab:
2. This will immediately take you to the Pages sub-tab:
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3. To make a page click on the Create page button in the upper right hand side:
4. This will bring up an empty page for you to begin editing, starting with the Edit title and
description tab:
Fill out the Page title field. You need to provide a title for your page, because by default, all pages
created are called ‘Untitled’.
Optionally, you can fill out the Page description area, where you can write a short description of
your page, such as its purpose or a summary. Make sure you don’t have any images in the Page
description area of your pages – you can have text, just not images – images won’t display in
the Page description area when shared via Secret URL, due to a bug.
Tags: Tags are labels or keywords that you can use to classify and search for pages.
Name display format: You must choose which name should be displayed when somebody else
views your portfolio.
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5. Click on the Save button at the bottom and it will immediately take you to the Edit content tab.
You will see a Page saved successfully message along with a green tick:
6. In this example, we are going to change it to a simple even two-column layout. To do this, go to
the Edit layout tab and click on it.
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7. Choose the 2 columns row, and then select the Equal widths radio button:
Scroll down to the bottom and click on the Save button.
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8. It will immediately take you back to the Edit content tab, and you will be shown a message
stating Page layout changed, along with a green tick:
9. Now you can add content to your page, such as text blocks, image blocks, files to download,
blocks from your resume, embedded video and RSS feeds.
10. While you are in the Edit content tab of your Page, you can drag and drop content blocks from
the sub-tabs (Files, images and video; Journals; General; Profile; Résumé; External
content; USQ) to create your page.
11. In this example, a Text box block is being dragged to the first column:
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12. The Text box: Configure dialogue window will come up, and you can add a Title to the Text
box, and then add in and format text as you would a word processor:
13. Click on the Save button. You can add other blocks from the other tabs to populate your page with
content, such as videos, RSS feeds, documents for others to download.
14. Now, add an image block in the same manner:
15. When finished adding content, scroll down to the bottom and click on the Done button, which will
save your page and immediately take you back to your Pages list area.
16. You have now created a Page:
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Extension activity 2: Create a collection of those pages
In your USQ Mahara ePortfolio, you can create Pages that contain the artefacts (also known as
assets) you have uploaded.
These Pages can be arranged and presented in any order within a Collection.
A Collection is like a mini-website (or a mini-ePortfolio) within your ePortfolio. You can also make a
copy of your collection.
As with Pages, you can have as many Collections as you want.
1. In this tutorial, we are going to make three pages (Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3) into a
Collection.
2. To start making your Collection, go to the Collections sub-tab:
3. As you can see there are no collections yet:
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4. Click on the New collection button:
5. Here you will Edit title and description, by adding in the Collection Name* and optionally a
Collection description. You can also select whether or not you want a Page navigation bar
(a tabbed menu at the top) for your pages. In this example, the Collection description is being
left blank:
On the bottom, click on the Next: Edit collection pages button.
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6. Select which pages you want to add into your Collection by ticking the selection boxes next to
them. Then click on the Add pages button:
7.
8. You will receive a message saying Pages added to collection. Collection updated to include
access from new pages along with a green tick. Here you can rearrange the order in which the
pages appear by using the small up (
remove pages from your collection:
) or down (
) arrows to reorder your pages. You can also
When finished, click on the Done button.
9. You will see that there is now one Collection. To go to your collection, click on the title of your
Collection – it is also a link and will take you straight to the first page of your Collection:
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10. As you can see the navigation tabs are in the correct order:
If all of your pages are in collections, they will not turn up as individual pages in the
Share tab of the Portfolio tab.
In other words, if a page is within a collection, you cannot share that page individually
unless you create a new standalone version of that page, i.e. copy that page.
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Extension activity 3: Copy a collection
If you copy one of your own collections, the process will replicate each and every page that
is in the parent collection you are intending to copy.
In other words, you will end up with two of every page.
1. To copy a collection, while you are in the Collections sub-tab of Portfolio, click on the Copy a
collection button:
2. Search by page name or by owner name. Here the name of one of the pages has been searched
for (click on the Search button):
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3. The search result will appear. To copy the Collection, click on the Copy collection button:
4. You will receive a message stating Copied X pages, X blocks and X artefacts from My
Adventures along with a green tick. You can change the copied Collection name here. For the
sake of this tutorial, however, we are going to leave it:
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5. Click on the Next: Edit collection pages button. Here you can add or delete pages from your
newly copied collection. Click on the Done button:
6. You now have two Collections:
7. When you go back to Portfolio > Pages, you can see that copies have been made of the original
pages:
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