Once you have thoughtfully made the decision, set up the guiding team, and scoped out the plan for a Mahara Implementation, you will need to get into the nitty-gritty of making it happen.
Whether you are running a large-scale implementation or a small-scale local implementation, you will have to motivate and enable your end users to engage. Here are some ideas that may help:
- Draw up and implement a communications plan that targets all different types of stakeholders, for example users, staff, leaders, trainers, assessors, parents, employers, external agencies, press and media, and so on.
- Publicize some real-life case studies and examples of Mahara in action. The quarterly online Mahara newsletter highlights such case studies (https://mahara.org/newsletter/).
- Make sure everyone gets a copy of your new user guide. You could use this book for your staff members and provide or adapt the online user guide provided by the Mahara Community at http://manual.mahara.org. This manual will always link to the latest version of Mahara. It is important to check which version of the manual you are using and that it matches your own Mahara version. Mahara docs are hosted at "Readthedocs" and you should see the Read the Docs button in the bottom right corner that allows you to switch to other branches of the documentation.
- Set the Expectations. You may wish to set explicit incentives and penalties connected to user adoption. For instance, if you do X, you get Y.... Hurrah! If you fail to complete X, Y is the consequence, booooo!
- Practically help people to overcome barriers.
- Offer support via telephone, face-to-face, live website support, or you could set up a Mahara group as a helpdesk for your users and make sure everyone knows how to access this sort of technical support and advice as and when they need it.
- Set up a User Suggestions facility, where users can come up with ideas and actively influence what gets done with your Mahara.
- Set the Standards. One idea is to award medals for implementing standards in pages and groups.
While it is crucial that you can see the big picture of what your ePortfolio platform will deliver before you start, it is important not to get bogged down with the big picture, and to focus in on some practical deliverables, which you can implement quickly. Either you, your platform designer, or your design team will need to quickly implement, and equally quickly and publicly celebrate some quick wins. Let's get you thinking:
- Can you identify some instant fixes where using Mahara would solve a real problem that you are facing?
- Alternatively, can you identify which of your own user groups would respond best to — and therefore quickly adopt — an ePortfolio as a media for learning delivery?
- If people need to migrate to Mahara from other means of gathering and presenting their portfolio evidence (paper-based work, another platform, a USB stick, a wiki, a website, and so on), how are you going to convince them that it will be worth the effort? (Don't forget they can always link back from their new Mahara pages to any previous websites they created, if the site is still available).
You are going to have to ask, listen to, and respond to whatever people want to do in their Mahara! To make your implementation work, you will need to:
- Conduct regular response analyses
- Get together for strategy reviews
- Do something in response to what you find out
You will need to get your users expressing and sharing their ideas, their reflections, and their learning (their pages) within groups who share similar interests. If you are going to get your Mahara site running, you are going to have to jump on any chance to ignite the fire that will turn it into a lively online community — always dealing with educationally and topically-burning issues of the day as they arise.
Response analyses can be, but need not be dull online or offline survey feedback routines. An equally good response analysis is a show of hands in a meeting, or a chat in a cafeteria.
Don't just ask questions such as:
- Have you used it? How often?
- Did you like it? How much?
Also ask more open, forward looking questions such as:
- How else could using a digital portfolio help you in your life or study?
- What other topics would you like to reflect upon with other people?
The most important thing, though, is that you get together to talk about the response and thereby, start to responsively and appropriately review your ongoing strategy.
Your Mahara implementation process will inevitably meet people who act as implementation resisters. It is a fact of life that many people react badly to change, even when it is good for them.
You will, therefore, need to apply some situational response tactics as your implementation progresses.
The Pessimist might say, "We can't change! We're doomed!"
The Pragmatist might say, "We've done enough, let's not change too far!"
The Technophobe might say: "This is too difficult for me, it's not fair!"
The Traditionalist might say, "I'm just too busy for this, this is a nice to do, not a have-to-do!"
The Cynic may say, "This is just a passing fad, ignore it, it will go away!"
...and the implementation team's worst enemy, the Critic, might say, "Rise up and rebel! We cannot allow this to happen!"
How will you buy people in? You can apply two types of tactic when you need to subdue the implementation resistors out there — "Big Bombs" and "Sniper Fire".
You use these tactics to try to affect the feelings of as many people as possible with the least amount of effort. Examples include:
- Powerbroker support: Get an institutional authority figure to express support in a public meeting or in a public newsletter.
- Identify and provide missing information: Is there something people need to know about Mahara's usefulness that you haven't told them? One example is that Mahara can serve as an online file storage area — a USB stick on the Internet. While this is not what Mahara is actually for, it is a useful utility that may start getting people to engage.
- Visiting expert: Bring in an external speaker, who can talk with expertise about Mahara and ePortfolios.
- Generic questionnaires: It is often a good idea to conduct a feedback survey, which picks up the mood of the crowd. The magic here lies in the public report-back stage in which you state how the crowd responded and go on to carefully and usefully explain where and why you agree and disagree.
- User guide promotions: Run events to promote your new user guides. Give user guides out at parties, in group meetings and events, in cafes, in induction programs, during training events, and so on.
- Poster campaign: Run posters all around your institution promoting use of your ePortfolio. For example, the Mahara logo with "Mahara means thinking" or "Mahara makes ME think!" written on it. (you may of course have a different institutional name for your own Mahara install and so will come up with better and more localized poster ideas).
- Competitions and celebrations: Best page awards, most medals awards, busiest user awards, most innovative online thought of the year, best online project and so on.
- Mass e-mails, newsletters, SMS, and news forums: Keep people up-to-date with the project. Give both the leaders and the users a clear and ongoing sense of project progress.
- Formal training event: Probably the best Big Bomb tactic of all? Bring in internal or external experts (for example, from a Mahara partner) to run a few day courses, which will really get cohorts of users confidently up and running with your platform.
Sometimes there will be particular people who you will need to influence in order to affect change. Some people will have more charisma and more interpersonal skills than others and it will be these people who you will need to win over, if you are going to encourage your people to adopt your platform. These people may not always be the people with the most important jobs, by the way! A secretary can often exert more influence than another manager, or a student in the class can often exert more influence over group behavior than the teacher:
- Corridor conversations: Identify an influential person and chat with him/her informally about the Mahara implementation (this can be a hugely useful tactic).
- Mentor matching: Get Mahara adopters into situations (you may have to do this subtly and covertly) where they can enthuse about their Mahara use with people who are Mahara-reticent.
- Targeted e-mails, SMS messages, or phone calls: Find your slow adopters and make them feel missed, make them feel identified, make them feel encouraged, and don't let up too quickly on encouraging them, there are all sorts of reasons why people may not feel involved.
- Targeted feedback questionnaires and response strategy: If you can identify the different types of change resistors in a survey (be careful not to be too crass about it!), you can conduct a more targeted communication response to these different types of needs and resistors.