Published on: 17/06/2025 · Last updated on: 17/06/2025
Purpose
- To ensure e-portfolio (summative) assessment is retained as per assessment regulations.
- To ensure students can access the Mahara platform, and their portfolio work, for the duration of their course.
- To ensure we clear out accounts that no longer need access to avoid having to increase our per-user licence unnecessarily.
- To contribute to a reduced carbon footprint by minimising data storage.
Account duration
- Accounts will be active for 5 years from the point of first login.
- After this time accounts will be automatically suspended.
- Where students still ‘attend’ the university (e.g. doing a distance learning course) accounts can be reinstated on request.
- Suspended accounts will be reviewed prior to the annual Mahara upgrade (September) and where students have left the university the accounts will be deleted.
Inactive accounts
- Accounts that have been inactive for 13 months will be suspended.
- Students will receive a notification email 1 week before suspension, giving them the chance to carry out some activity (which will prevent the suspension).
- The content of those suspended accounts stays in place.
- Accounts can be reinstated on request.
- Once suspended accounts reach the end of their duration they will be deleted as explained above.
Submission archiving
- Mahara ‘archives’ relate to backup copies of portfolios which have been submitted for assessment (to a Moodle Assignment or to a Mahara Group). Mahara refers to these backup copies as archived submissions and they are only accessible by Mahara administrators (in the TEL team).
- Whether a portfolio is marked for ‘archiving’ is the responsibility of the academic staff carrying out the assessment of portfolio submissions. If portfolio assessment submissions are not marked for archiving (via Moodle Assignment or Mahara Groups) it is the responsibility of teaching teams to manage archiving according to assessment regulations.
- Prior to the annual Mahara upgrade (September) all archived portfolio submissions will be exported and stored in SharePoint.
- On completion of the export, those archived portfolio submissions will be deleted from Mahara.
- The exported submissions will be stored in SharePoint for 6 years before being deleted.
- Staff can request archived submissions be retrieved from SharePoint. Department staff will need to provide student username, portfolio name, submission date and/or year of submission. Archived submissions can only be retrieved in cases of assessment queries as per assessment regulations.
- Students should be encouraged to export their portfolios directly from Mahara as, once they leave the university, they will no longer have access to the platform. The TEL team will not be able to retrieve stored content for students.
Mahara Server Backups
The Mahara server is backed up according to the following schedule, to provide a means to keep Mahara running in the unlikely event that the ‘live’ server fails:
- Daily Backup: This is a daily copy of the Mahara database and is kept for 7 days. The daily backup runs at 2 AM.
- Hourly Backup: The hourly backup copies the Mahara database and is kept for 24 hours.
- Recovery time: Depending on where any failure is with the ‘live’ server (hardware/software) the recovery period would probably be 2-5 days.
Glossary
Mahara – a university supported e-portfolio software.
e-Portfolio assessment submission – refers to an e-portfolio that has been submitted by students, either via a Moodle Assignment or a Mahara Group, for assessment purposes.
Archived submission – when a student portfolio for assessment is released following grading, a copy is made and stored as a backup copy. Mahara refers to these backup copies as archived submissions. Archives are only taken if this option is enabled by academic staff.
SharePoint – a secure storage area.