Richard Oelmann

Mahara Hui was a bit different this year!

For the past few years, Catalyst have sponsored a one day conference, focused on Mahara, but incorporating Moodle users too. The Mahoodle conferences at Cambridge, Cranfield and Gloucestershire (Please don't shout at me, other hosts, but those are the ones I've been able to attend the last few years ) have seen 50-60 Moodle and Mahara users gather to share best practice and celebrate success with others in the community.

But then COVID happened.

More and more of our regular conferences started moving online, as so much of our learning and teaching has had to and it didn't take long before...

Thanks to Sam, Teresa, Jasmin, Gordon and several more of the 'usual culprits' the idea of moving a Mahara day entirely online was born, and, with support from Catalyst management Sam put her incredible organisational skills into play and, together with myself and Aurelie, the Virtual Mahui UK/IE 2020 was born.

50-60 participants, we estimated. About what we've had for the in-person Mahoodle days the last few years...

A figure that disappeared behind us within the first few days of pushing out the sign up sheet! And with sign-ups from all over Europe and beyond, from the English south coast to the Highlands and Islands, Wales and Ireland, the signups moved out to France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, UAE, Canada and on down to Australia among many other locations. A small UK Mahara conference had gone global with over 150 signups.

Speakers volunteered - our keynote, Kristina from NZ (part of the Catalyst Mahara core team), and others from all areas of the European Mahara community, all sharing their brilliant Mahara experiences. And the organisation to deal with those presentations differed from our previous Mahoodle experiences too - Would Big Blue Button cope with the numbers? What website would we use to base the day on.

Well, fortunately, the Catalyst system administrators came into their own and the long planned community.catalyst-eu.net site was born just in time to host the Mahara Hui site Sam constructed, while Aurelie organised testing and communications with the speakers and Richard made sure that BBB, with some streaming backup, would cope with the potential numbers. In the end, between those taking part directly on BigBlueButton and those watching the YouTube streaming, over 90 participants were online at any one time through much of the morning, and around 70 through the afternoon.

And the feedback from the day was equally pleasing (Take a look at the #mahui20 hashtag).

And to think, 'It started with a tweet!'