General developer forum

Hi,

I contemplated whether to post this message in the following forum:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=38736; but decided not to given the history of the thread and the focus on the "Portfolio Module" as a specific implementation. Somebody may choose to move the thread as required.

I'm writing to describe the Open University's (OU) planned work for development of an electronic portfolio system/application/tool for the OU's Virtual Learning Environment and to garner feedback, comments and interest from the community. The Portfolio tool the OU is proposing to develop will become a Moodle Tool and make use of many Moodle components (including current and future plan Moodle components; e.g. Forums, Wikis, Blogs, Repository, Roles+Permissions, etc.).

As a side point, I have started touch-point discussions with Matt Oquist (http://moodle.org/user/view.php?id=82371&course=5) to see if our work matches his work on the "Portfolio Module" and whether there is any scope for us to merge our two activities into one Moodle development effort. This has only started so its a developing discussion.


OU Portfolio System Proposal
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1.0 Background
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The OU has spent 6 months doing stakeholder analysis to determine the OU's definition and requirements for an "Electronic Portfolio". We have done feasibility studies which included evaluating open source and commercial Portfolio Systems. We are now piloting a commercial Portfolio System within various small groups and courses within the OU.

This background study has given us a strong understanding of the current and developing trends in the "Electronic Portfolio" space and also given us the strength of will to say exactly what we think an "Electronic Portfolio" is and what the OU needs. We hope that this perepsctive generally match the world-wide trends and this posting will hopefully help us test this perspective.


2.0 Project Objectives
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The OU Portfolio project objectives are:

a) To create an "Electronic Portfolio" tool that will be used by all users within the Open University community and ideally to support their life-long, life-wide learning and personal development; the latter implies we may want the tool to be made available to users beyond their study life with the OU;

b) The "Electronic Portfolio" tool will become a standard tool within the Moodle tool-set;

c) The "Electronic Portfolio" tool will leverage Moodle components and tools where relevant and as appropriate; this means we will not duplicate functionality in the Portfolio tool where they are sensibly found in Moodle and are applicable and usable;

d) The "Electronic Portfolio" tool should acknowledge and address the issue of supporting Portfolio systems provided by multiple learning institutes; this may be at the data/content level (i.e. the transfer of the "Portfolio" as a content item from one insitution to another) or it may be at the system interoperability level; where appropriate the OU will follow trends in the international standards world such as IMS (http://www.imsglobal.org/ep/index.html);

e) The "Electronic Portfolio" tool will support users whilst they are studying in a course, working in a social/group context, working on their own under the banner of personal and career development, or provide support to achieve accreditation from professional awarding bodies and profession groups;


3.0 Portfolio Definition
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Formally, from a UK perspective, an ePortfolio system can be defined as a system to support reflective and self directed learning by enabling the collection (or archive) of reflective writing and associated evidence, which documents learning [and life experiences] and which a learner may draw upon to identify and present his/her learning and achievements. It encompasses the concept of personal development records (PDRs), including records that may contribute to the UK Higher Education Progress File (UK Dearing report, 1997), and extends beyond that, to incorporate artefacts which may evidence claims
made in Personal Development Records.

In practice, one cannot easily define a portfolio. One can define portfolio by its function; i.e. what does it allow you to do. But more usefully, portfolio should be defined by what you use it for and in what context it is usaeful and add value to your work (life, career or study).

The purpose and usage context of an ePortfolio within the Open University includes:
A) supporting students studying course- and programme-related requirements for ePortfolio;
B) supporting the development of portfolios of evidence for accreditation with professional and academic bodies;
C) supporting OU staff in their learning and career development (CDP) requirements.

In essence the Open Universitys ePortfolio system needs to:
A) Enable students to save study and learning related items (e.g. a snap shot of a blog, a paper, or notes from a training day). Importantly it needs to enable students to save OU study activities at a click of a button within the VLE.
B) Interrogate, manipulate and search the store (or repository).
C) Enable the students to create, save and manipulate multiple portfolios created for a range of purposes (e.g. assignments, CVs).
D) Share specific items or portfolios with others (often for feedback and comment).

There is no right or wrong answer/definition. There are common portfolio functional elements/abilities but how they are used define your definition of a portfolio.


4.0 Project Progress
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The OU development team are now in what we call "System Detailed Design" phase where we translate our stakeholder consultatin of features and functionality into documented system requirements. This work has developed:

a) Use Case documentation;

b) Functional Requirements documentation;

c) A wireframe prototype to demonstrate the interaction of features and functions;

d) Working staticvisuals of user interface designs and analysis of terminology, concepts and metaphors;

These outcomes and development have been through the OU stakeholders to confirm their accuracy and we have engaged in usability sessions with real potential users to test that our thinking and recommendations are correct.

We are at the stage where these outcomes are complete in the 1st draft and requiring a 2nd draft review. It is for this reason that this posting is being made as we feel it is a good time to get feedback from the Moodle community.


5.0 The OU Portfolio Solution Details
-------------------------------------

The diagram below depicts the architectural view of what the Open Universiy Portfolio system will be:



There are many components in the diagram which demonstrates the many interdependencies inherent in an "Electronic Portfolio" system.

We have spent a great deal of time arguing and clarifying what people mean when they say they want an "Electronic Portfolio" and this debate has define for us clearly what we see as in-scope and out-of-scope of a portfolio system.

Our Portfolio system is scoped as box number 4 in the diagram.

Box number 1, 2 and 3 are specialised "Portfolio" applications (usages of a portfolio) that is built on top of a Portfolio System.

The Portfolio system needs box number 5, 11, and 12 to exists for it to work; i.e. these components are the basis from which you build a portfolio system.

Box number 7, 8, 9 and 10 are example tools in Moodle that may generate content that is to be saved in a Portfolio System. There will be many others but these boxes show the relationship of Moodle and Moodle tools in relation to a Portfolio System.

So if these are the component pieces, what follows is an explanatio of what they do......

Box Number 5: Personal Repository
---------------------------------
When most people talk about a Portfolio System they are generally talking about a Personal Repository or Personal Content Management System or their personal local desktop computer hard drive.

This is because to create a portfolio; there must be a means to collect content, information; to organise the content into a meaningful folder/virtual organisation; and then to comment on the content item and manage its many edits and version history.

All this effort is about collating "evidence"/"content" that may be useful now or later in creating a body of work (content) called a Portfolio.

We consider the "Personal Repository" as a useful tool in its own right and should exists indepant of a Portfolio System. That is a person can have and make of a "Personal Repository" without a Portfolio System; but a Portfolio System cannot exist without a "Personal Repository" tool.

Note: the "Personal Repository" will also be the means to publish and share content with other users. On this front we see a "Portfolio" content item as just another content item to be managed by the "Personal Repository".

Box Number 4: Portfolio
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In our strictest working defintiion, this component is what we call an "Electronic Portfolio" system.

Its job is to:
A) Provide a tool for a user to reflect on any collated "evidence"/content found within their "Personal Repository"; think if this as a blogging tool but the blog is always attached to some piece of "evidence"/content;

B) Provide a Portfolio Manager function to organise and collate and merge all the "evidence"/content found within their "Personal Repository" into a content item called a Portfolio; a Portfolio may be structured and supported by templates which define what content is held within it and how the content is to be laid out and visually presented;

C) Provide a Portfolio Wizard that provides an easy to use computer-mediated wizard interface to guid a user to create portfolio content items; this is akin to a program installation wizard and is provided as a structured way to help somebody create a portfolio as opposed to the create the portfolio any way you like offered by the Portfolio Manager. What the wizard does, how many wizard exists depends on the usage, the developing insitution, etc.

D) Provide a Forms Management function which allows the development of structured electronic forms and the usage of these forms to collate structured information for inclusion in a portfolio. These forms may include, name+address, your objectives, your work experience, etc. The structured nature of these information (i.e. XML usae?) means they can be computaionally munged fpr the user into a nice visual portfolio without much technical input from the user;

E) Finally a wholse set of fucntionality around admistering and creating reports to support the Portfolio system in general;

Box number 7, 8, 9, 10 and 13
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We have taken the clear view that many other tools exists to create content. This includes your desktop office application (Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, etc.) and may include VLE Moodle tools such as Forums, Blogs Wikis, etc.

The portfolio system should not duplicate these functions; instead allow content created using these tool to be stored in the the "Personal Repository" for inclusion in the creation of a portfolio. The content stored will be "static snnapshots" of dynamically changing content from blogs, wikis, etc. Hey are snapshots personal to the user of the portoflio (i.e. their own copy of the content snippet).

Once the "static snnapshot" content is in the "Personal Repository", they can choose to organise any way the choose and use the Portfolio refelctive writing tool to annotate it and to use the Portfolio Manager to compile the content into a "Portfolio".

Box number 1, 2 and 3
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If "Box Number 4: Portfolio" is the generic portfolio system, then Box number 1, 2 and 3 are specific applications (usage) of the portfolio system. By application I mean, they will contain reading materials, guidance on usage and support material for usage on how you make use of a portfolio system and its features and functions to do specific tasks such as Persaonl Develoment, Career Development, etc.

For example, in the Open University, we see OU courses that use an electronic portfolio system as an example of an "application" of a portfolio system.

Box number 11 and 12
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These demonstrate that the Portfolio system will depend on Moodle for roles+permissions and user+group management.

Box number 6
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This box demonstrates that the "Personal Repository" is a subset of a more generic repository system to be provided by Moodle.

Note: See this discussion on the proposed generic repository system (http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=43689)

We see the Portfolio System being built on the proposed generic repository system described in the aforementioned thread discussion.




6.0 Implementation Roadmap
--------------------------

The Open University is near the stage of beginning to build the components labelled as box number 1, 4, 5 and 6. The plan is to potentially begin code writing in mid-May 2006 and aim for first deliverable in February 2007.


Closing remarks
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This posting has a lot of detail, and I'm in danger of providing too much.

Feel free to review this proposal and feed back your comments and ask directed questions on any issues.


Thanks,

Thanh Le.