Bachelorthesis - Mahara and teacher education

The last few points are getting finalized, and then starting with the next term, a colleague and me are going to start to work on our Bachelor thesis, which will include a heavy dose of Mahara, and it's role in our teacher education at the University of Education Vienna.

Our Mahara-research project is in it's second year now, and we are getting more and more involved with Mahara as an ePortfolio tool for our student-teachers.

The thesis will include the basics of ePortfolios, what kind of portfolio types are there and how are they used. But our biggest focus will be on Mahara, not only on the technical part of it, but also the possibilities of its use.

Some of the data that’s available from our research project will also be processed, and we will focus on our teacher education. We are both very much looking forward to digging in and involving ourselves more and more into Mahara, ePortfolios and teacher-education at our University.

One of our goals was to put out a Mahara-Tutorial for our student-teachers, which we accomplished last semester. It wasn’t the first time we worked together on a Mahara task, but it was equally challenging and fun. As the research project went on, and we’re getting closer to the end of our studies, it seemed more and more obvious that our Bachelor thesis will be about Mahara in combination with our teacher education. One of the benefits of the research project was that we were able to see both sides: the student-teacher side, which uses Mahara as a tool during their studies, and also from the reseacher side, where we got to work on questionnaires and evaluate the results, create a Manual and generally help students with Mahara.

So as one of our research team members suggested that we write a Bachelor thesis together it hit us as the most obvious idea. It sounded exciting right from the start even though we had a lot to do at the end of this semester and couldn’t focus that much on it, the start of the fall semester will also mark the start of our work!