E-portfolio
From Dokeos
Contents |
Portfolio Introduction
A student portfolio is a tool which is particularly well suited to new forms of learning, such as constructivism, which emphasises learning by experience and self-discovery [1]. With higher education in Europe becoming ever more flexible, individualised learning pathways are on the rise. Not only is there a growing need for students to showcase their individual profile, there is also a need to illustrate their competences acquired previously or elsewhere.
The portfolio in education is:
- student-centered
- competence-oriented
- cyclical with regard to action and reflection
- multimedia-oriented.
Portfolios are not intended to archive all the completed works. A selection of completed works to illustrate the competences is useful. But the real added value of portfolios lies in the reflection about the learning process.
The portfolio should be a very flexible tool which can be tailored to specific educational contexts.
Status
From Spring till summer 2005, there was a 'mini-portfolio' in Dokeos 1.6, which was later renamed as 'My profile', as it was not more than this. It is only reacheable through the 'who's online' function, which means one can't consult the mini-portfolio/profile of users that are not logged in. [2]
Relation Dokeos / portfolio
Dokeos started as an e-learning tool focused on collaborative learning in which sharing one's productions is a key concept [2]. In practice however, Dokeos has been course based. There is more and more a need to be student based. There have already been some developments in that direction (thinking about my agenda, personal agenda, ...). The current student tools 'dropbox' and 'student publications' are inadequate for collaborative learning.
Many Dokeos users are in need of a good portfolio system. Those that have already portfolio's running in production (Zope/Plone based at VUB, OSPI at Hogent) or in testing (Erasmus Hogeschool Brussel) are missing the integration of their portfolio systems with Dokeos. The places to integrate portfolio in Dokeos are plenty:
- Everywhere user names are shown, there should be a link to their portfolio (who's online, user lists, ...)
- student publications and dropbox (student provides link to document in portfolio) [4]
- attachments to fora (student provides link to document in portfolio)
In the other direction the Portfolio should be able to integrate lots of things from the Dokeos course management system:
- 'My courses'
- 'My completed exercises and learning paths'
- 'My forum contributions'
- all general info the Dokeos course management system knows already about, such as the relations students - teachers - courses - passwords (single logon).
While the portfolio users are complaining about lack of integration with Dokeos, other Dokeos users [3] want the portfolio separated from the rest of Dokeos, for reasons of complexity and scalability.
- As some universities have quite a large amount of users (UGent for instance: 26.000 students), we should bear in mind that this portfolio should be able to run on a separate server.
Therefore it should be possible to disable the portfolio functionality in Dokeos. Those that want the course system and the portfolio system on separate servers, can run one Dokeos instance with portfolio functionality disabled and one Dokeos instance with portfolio but without any courses.
My course list | My profile | My agenda
Should be extended to
My course list | My profile | My agenda | My portfolio
- the above makes no sense to me ... from descriptions above, are not "my course list", "my profile", "my agenda" actually part of the content of "my portfolio" ?? --Wolfgang 13:34, 15 November 2006 (CET)
Architecture
Experiences with the development of other portfolio systems (VUB's Plone/Zope based portfolio, Roxen CMS based portfolio, ...), we learnt that the easiest and optimal way to start a portfolio development is on top of an CMS, with a roles and permissions framework. The new development of the Dokeos CMS with roles and permissions is already taking this into account.
Roles and permissions
Necessary Roles:
- Owner
- Teacher
- Student
- Authenticated visitor
- Anonymous visitor
Permissions:
Owners should be able to set the access and edit permissions of their folders and files.
Easily said: owners should be able to decide if their documents are visible:
- Public (visible to everyone through internet)
- Intranet (only authentificated users, e.g. educational exception copyrighted works)
- Teachers (e.g. strengths-weaknesses analysis)
- Private (e.g. texts that are not finished yet)
For group collaboration, users should be able to assign others the Owner role on their objects and folders.
Structure and Layout
Owners should have an 'explorer' like view on their portfolio, with the structure of a portfolio folder with objects and subfolders. (can be seen as personal documents tool or as portfolio builder)
It should be possible for the visitors to see the portfolio as a regular website.
Image:Screenshot Pointcarre Portfolio Owner Explorer view.png Image:Screenshot Pointcarre Portfolio Visitor view.png Image:Screenshot Pointcarre Portfolio Owner Public view.png
Image:Screenshot Pointcarre Menu.png As interlinking, and certainly creating a contents table is difficult, there should be a automatically created context-sensitive menu at the left side of each portfolio page. This context-sensitive menu should show
- Portfolio home
- Folder(s) above Current Folder
- Current Folder
- folders and objects under current folder
- Folders beside Current Folder
- Current Folder
- Folder(s) above Current Folder
Users should be able to sort the folders and objects in the context-sensitive menu.
The picture of the portfolio author should be shown on (e.g. the right of) every of his documents. Not only for esthetical reasons, but also practical: it is easy for teachers to be linked from one portfolio to another, and the picture is an immediate visual hint that this happened.
Proposal for layout design:
- Top of the page: Dokeos header
- Left of the page: contents table
- Middle of page: the real content of the portfolio
- Right of the page: picture of author
- Bottom of the page: dokeos footer
Each document should show the authors and the date of last change.
Recently, the Dojo library (JavaScript ToolKit) has been added to the sources of Dokeos 1.8. In this case, the drag-and-drop functionalities of this library could be use to offer reordering of portfolio items in-place inside the menu (with a bit of AJAX). This would save us from developing a specific interface to re-order the menu items.
Portfolio contents
Possible contents:
- Main page / introduction
- CV
- Competence center
- Overview Competences
- Strengths and Weaknesses analysis
- Personal learning plan
- Reflection
- Blog
- Archive center
- papers, reports, ...
Content Creation and upload
It should be possible to create documents online with the Dokeos WYSIWYG html editor.
It should be possible to upload all kind of files created on the user's computer.
Each directory should be able to hold different content types.
Possible predefined content types are:
- documents (html documents created with online editor or uploaded)
- links
- blog articles
- images
- files (other files uploaded from hard disk)
Comments
There should be a possibility (at least) for teachers to give comments on every object.
- The student can indicate for each document that others (maybe specified by roles as teachers or students) should or should not be able to post comments on this document (default: off)
- Or: teachers should always be able to give comments, while Owners should be able to show or hide each individual comment (from others than teachers).
- It should be possible to invite other people (by sending an e-mail) to post comments on a portfolio, documents, ...
- when someone post a comment, (s)he can decide wether the student can or cannot modify this comment (default: no change allowed)
The different options mentionned above could be configurable on both user and admin level (with allow override yes or no)
Personal Agenda
Patrick Cool : There is already a development for this so it would be simply moving the code from my agenda to my portfolio
Frederik Questier : Unless somebody has a use scenario where the agenda is shown in the portfolio, this could stay a personal tool besides portfolio?
Varia
- 1 portfolio per student
- Every object should have an worldwide accessible unique identifier.
- Support for metadata
- Support for different licenses: normal copyright, creative commons, GNU FDL, public domain.
- Search functionality across all portfolio's.
- Interlinking should be facilitated
- Blog functionality (journal, diary) is interesting feature, used in educational settings.
- Quota: there should be quota on the portfolio (or the larger user space or content repository).
- Archival of complete portfolio's (Pack and Go)
- Print Output possibilities
- Breadcrumbs would be nice.
- Nice to have: 'last changes of this portfolio' or notifications of changes
References
[1] W. Meeus, F. Questier, T. Derks, The open source eportfolio: development and implementation of an institution-wide electronic portfolio platform for students, Journal of Educational Media International, accepted
[2] Forum discussion: My e-portfolio
[3] Forum discussion: DISCUSSION - Content Management System (CMS) Portfolio
