Announcing the Release of the Karuta Open Source Portfolio Version 3.0

The Karuta project, under the umbrella of the Apereo Foundation, is pleased to announce the release of version 3.0 of the Karuta Open Source Portfolio. This ninth release is an important milestone offering increased enhancements to improve UI design, the import of community templates, the creation of dashboards and reports, and the monitoring and maintenance of existing portfolios.

Adopted by an increasing number of institutions, Karuta offers a simple, flexible, yet powerful way for portfolio designers to customize portfolio workflows for learning, assessment, reporting, and showcasing.

Design

• As with any content-management tool, designers can create columns and mix images,text, and various Karuta resources to present more engaging and easier to usevportfolio workflows. See the Pandemic Portfolio.
• New block resources (documentBlock,UrlBlock, etc.) support this graphical orientation with images that are now clickable.

Reports

• Reports are now much more powerful. New programmatic features give better control for generating sophisticated dashboards. For example, the new “link resource to existing student portfolios” (URL2Portfolio) can be used to streamline instructor grading environments.

Batches

• Batches are used to streamline the creation of accounts and portfolios. New functionalities can now modify and update existing portfolios using available designer actions (e.g., metadata, CSS, etc.). This improved functionality is particularly useful for managing portfolio projects that span many years (e.g., by adding sections, features, etc.) or for export purposes.

Various

• Designers now have access to a configuration page where all the colors and graphical features of a portfolio (e.g., font and background colors, links, etc.) can be easily set.
• The designer can also enter global variables to be used in Search and Menus. This improvement greatly simplifies the import of community portfolio templates. There is now a simple Karuta Configuration Folder for admin purposes (e.g., to house images for the Welcome page, lost password prompts, etc.).
• Installation is now much simpler and is fully documented on the ePortfolium website.
• (Select English or French and click the Downloads tab to access the code.)
• Designer and admin users can now create any number of folders and sub-folders for managing emerging portfolio prototypes or cohorts of user portfolios.
• Comprehensive documentation for customizing Karuta is now available.

Get in Touch: karuta@apereo.org