Introduction

Depending on the assessment's requirements you may specify that students 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. 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.

By default all students at UCL have a MyPortfolio account, you will however have to create groups and arrange with Digital Education to restrict editing for group members at the assessment deadline. This can only be done by Digital Education.

UCL Reflect is a by request service, for an assessment you will need to request a class blog. Digital Education will create the class blog and any associated individual or group student blogs attached to the main class blog. As part of the settings for a class blog you are able to restrict editing to the blogs yourself at the assessment deadline. See the sections on UCL Reflect below for more information about class blogs and how to request one.

UCL Reflect

UCL Reflect 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. For ideas on how UCL Reflect can be used see the Digital Education blog post Reflect's Hall of Mirrors.

There is a particular process for requesting a class blog, this is outlined in the Reflect Blogging Resource Centre article Requesting a Class blog with student contributors or affiliated student blogs.

This outlines in more detail the three scenarios for using the class blog feature:

1. Students contribute to one overall class blog / web site.
2. Students contribute to a group blog / web site.
3. Students contribute to their own blog / web site.

Using UCL Reflect

The following short videos explain more about Reflect, managing class blogs and show you how to access and edit / contribute to a UCL Reflect site. All the videos have captions and a transcript.

• UCL Reflect: Introduction
  • Introduction Transcript
• UCL Reflect: Class Blogs
  • Class Blogs Transcript
• 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

All students and staff automatically have accounts on MyPortfolio. You can access MyPortfolio via Moodle by clicking on Services and MyPortfolio.

Groups

For managing an assessment using MyPortfolio students should be allocated to a Group. This may be a single group for the whole cohort or a number of smaller groups.

These should be Controlled groups and should Allow Submissions. For more information see section 6.3.2. Create a group as staff member or institution administrator of the Mahara Manual.

By default all submitted pages and collections are locked for editing until released by the Tutor or Administrator.

Submission and Feedback

Students can submit portfolio pages and collections to their assigned Group. 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 thye have submitted your pages and collections, they cannot make any changes to

• files

• journal entries

• text boxes

• notes

• links to external content

They 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.

If you have the role of Tutor or Administrator for a group that allows submissions you are able to comment on the submitted work.

In addition, you can see all submitted pages and collections with a time stamp on the group’s homepage. You will be able to see the following information:

1. Title of the portfolio. This can be either a page or a collection.

2. Owner of the portfolio. You can click the name in order to view the profile page.

3. Time when the portfolio was submitted to this group.

You are able to provide feedback on an inidividual page or a collection, this is facilitated via comments. Details are provided in section 5.9.2. Instructor feedback of the Mahara manual.

Submitted pages and collections are effectively locked until relseased by a Tutor or Administrator. If you require students to submit a draft, and then the final portfolio. You will need to unlock the submitted pages to enable students to continue editing the relevant portfolio pages and collections. To do this click the Release page / Release collection button to unlock the portfolio. This will enable the student(s) to be able to make changes again.