Mahara vs Portflow

Mahara is a free ePortfolio system for learning communities. Students and staff can collect evidence, reflect on experiences, and relate work to competencies or registration requirements. Listed uses include study, professional development, work-integrated learning, assessment, presentation, and employability. Portfolios can be shared with an individual, group, or the public, with access limited by a time frame or assessment task. Users can comment, give feedback, build portfolios together in groups, and take part in group forums. Portfolios can be submitted to learning management systems through LTI for marking. Mahara is open source, under conditions that include providing source code with copies and using the same license for derivative works. It can be hosted on a Linux server; the manual also describes Docker setup for development and testing, and advises securing that environment before live use. The manual describes LTI 1.3 Advantage as experimental and tested only with Brightspace. The project links to community forums, a manual, a wiki, an issue tracker, and extended security support; Catalyst is named as maintainer.

Portflow is a student-owned learning and assessment portfolio that extends an institution’s learning management system or virtual learning environment. Students can set personal or programme goals, collect evidence from different learning contexts, organize portfolios into collections and sections, and track progress. They can request feedback from LMS users and external guests, with discussions supported by threaded comments, attachments, and recordings. For assessment, students can lock selected portfolio content into a snapshot and submit it through an LMS assignment for review in its Grader. They can also share showcase portfolios or export their contents as zipped files. Portflow integrates with Canvas, Brightspace, Blackboard, and Moodle. Its Android and iOS learner app supports photo, text, audio, and video evidence, offline capture, guest mode, and QR-code feedback; web access is also listed. Drieam offers a demo and contact options, but does not publish a price. The maker states that Portflow is GDPR compliant, LTI Advantage certified, and conforms to WCAG 2.2 level AA.