Introduction

Depending on the assessment requirements you may be asked to use UCL Reflect or MyPortfolio for creating an outward facing assessment such as a blog post or website, or an e-portfolio. UCL Reflect is UCL's educational blogging service. It is a WordPress service hosted by CampusPress, because of this it doesn't function in quite the same way as regular WordPress. It can be used as a blogging platform, but also to create websites including e-portfolios.  MyPortfolio is UCL's instance of Mahara, an e-portfolio tool. The Digital Education blog post Creating digital portfolios discusses the differences between UCL Reflect and MyPortfolio for e-portfolio creation.

UCL Reflect

If you have been asked to use UCL Reflect this will be as part of a class blog, this could take three forms depending on how the Reflect site(s) have been set-up for the assessment.

1. You contribute to one overall class blog / web site.

2. You contribute to a group blog / web site.

3. You contribute to your own blog / web site.

As your class tutor / assessor has overall control over the class blog(s) / web site(s) they can restrict when you can and cannot edit the relevant blog/web site. Typically editing is restricted at the end of the assessment window.

Using UCL Reflect

The following short videos show you how to access and edit / contribute to a UCL Reflect site. All the videos have captions and a transcript. If the Reflect site you are editing / contributing to has a pre-existing template do not modify the site beyond what you have been instructed as part of the assessment. If the Reflect site does not have a template, the choice of theme is especially important. Some themes work better with some types of content than others. For portfolios it is recommend that a theme from the portfolio category is selected.  

• UCL Reflect: Posts and Pages

  • Posts and Pages Transcript

• UCL Reflect: Menus

  • Menus Transcript

• UCL Reflect: Appearance (Themes and Widgets)

  • Appearance Transcript

• UCL Reflect: Plugins

  • Plugins Transcript

A series of how-to guides are available in the Reflect Resource Centre.

To find out how to do more, in depth guidance and self-paced online courses are available:

• EduBlogs User Guides

• LinkedIn Learning (Login with your UCL account so you can see everything!) And visit this collection of online WordPress (a.k.a. Reflect) training courses.

MyPortfolio

This brief introduction to this flexible and creative platform will give you an overview of what it can do and hopefully some inspiration about how it might be able to help you. It is likely that you will be assigned to a MyPortfolio group for assessment purposes. If required, editing can be restricted for groups at an assessment deadline. 

Using MyPortfolio

The MyPortfolio Resource Centre has a list of FAQs these should provide answers to most of your questions.

At UCL we use the Mahara software for our MyPortfolio platform, you'll find a curated list of guides from the official Mahara support site below. These are not produced by UCL, however they do offer help that is wholly applicable to MyPortfolio.  

Dashboard : This is basically the homepage of MyPortfolio - the first thing you see when you login. 

Content : The content section is where you can upload and manage elements of your MyPortfolio, such as files and journals. 

Portfolio : This is the section of MyPortfolio where you can manage pages, collections and sharing.

Groups : The perfect space to collaborate. Groups allow you to share files, talk in forums, build a shared page or create a shared journal. 

Adding content to a page, via blocks : When you create a page the main way to add content is via the blocks, this includes files, journals and external resources. 

Notification settings : Control whether you get email notifications for specific events within MyPortfolio.

Submitting pages or collections to a Group

When you are a member of a group that allows submissions, you can submit portfolio pages and collections for feedback / assessment. This allows an instructor to view the portfolio with much of the content locked into place, you do not have to give the group permission to access your page or collection when you want to submit your page or collection for feedback or assessment. Only the instructor(s) will be able to view your portfolio pages and collections.

Instructions for how to submit pages and collections are given in the Mahara manual section 5.9.1. Submit a page or collection for assessment.

Once you have submitted your pages and collections, you cannot make any changes to

• files

• journal entries

• text boxes

• notes

• links to external content

You can still

• edit plans

• update profile information

• change résumé information

• add new journal entries to a journal

• any external content on the source site, e.g. adding comments to a YouTube video, adding audio to a SlideShare presentation etc. or deleting the media.

It is therefore important that the pages and collections you submit are the final version of the work, unless you are required to submit a draft for feedback.