|
Please wait ......
ePortfolios - Overview
ePortfolios, e-Portfolios, or Electronic Portfolios, can be considered as the counterpart of conventional portfolios. They are proposed to collect, store, update, and share a record of student accomplishments, whether to show progress in mastering a field or to document educational outcomes. They support several purposes:
- E-portfolios allow students to reflect on their learning, communicate with instructors, document credentials, and provide potential employers with examples of their work.
- Faculty use teaching e-portfolios to easily capture and share teaching and learning methods, both to advance pedagogy and for promotions and tenure.
- Colleges and universities use institutional e-portfolios to provide accessible, persistent collections of data, analyses, and samples of student and faculty achievement that demonstrate institutional success.
Portfolio use is a long-established feature of certain disciplines. Students more generally have been offered a range of electronic tools to support their learning, such as personal web spaces, blogs, online careers resources and cv planners. Over the last few years the prominence of, and interest in, e-portfolios in all sectors of education has grown. The development of common standards is being demanded to enhance the value of this tool.
Some of the challenges that lie ahead related with the standardization include:- developing more accessible ways to represent ePortfolio content;
- achieving agreement on how multiple specifications should be coordinated;
- and developing standards to more rigorously define the relationships between elements within each portfolio and between those elements and other systems.
|
Interoperability Requirements
In order to meet user expectations, electronic portfolio management systems will almost surely need to interact with numerous diverse systems found at a typical institution of higher education. These may include course management systems, student information systems, authentication and authorization systems, certification systems and other ePortfolio systems. ePortfolio systems will need to exchange information about learners and other users, data the user has created, relationships between components of a portfolio, and information about the process of creating and using the portfolio.
Important interoperability considerations include:- Access to information about users across systems.
- Access to data created by users across systems.
- Standardization of data structures describing objects within a portfolio, the structure.
- of ePortfolio components, views of the portfolio, and the whole portfolio.
- Sharing common authentication and authorization services with other systems.
- Mapping data between educational communities.
- Enforcing verifiability, non-revocability, and IP rights across systems.
- Managing workflow across systems.
|
Working Groups (WGs)
There are several organizations working to establish standards and specifications relating to ePortfolios. Included in these efforts are the following projects:- The Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS) and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the U.K are coordinating the mapping of the U.K. transcript and personal development record specification to the IMS LIP Specification. They have extended LIP to represent more complex relationships between its components. This work is being extended to map between LIP and the European transcript as well.
- The Electronic Portfolio Consortium (ePortConsortium) is the collaboration of select higher education and IT institutions working to define, design and develop software for the forthcoming electronic portfolio environment and system. From a conceptual perspective, the consortium is trying to invent the new electronic portfolio application environment to address various ePortfolios needs. From the technical perspective, it intends to collaborate with IT institutions to define and adopt interoperability and transportability measures and standards while building prototypes to test scenarios and conceptual environments.
- The ePortfolio Interoperability XML (EPIX) Specification was released to the public in early 2003 with the goals of supporting the integration of ePortfolio Systems with other enterprise applications, and addressing issues of ePortfolio portability.
- European Initiative for E-Learning (EIfEL) launched the European Consortium for the Digital Portfolio at ePortfolio 2003 in France. The group hopes to address ePortfolio needs and practices in Europe. Currently it leads an initiative to establish an ePortfolio Interoperability Framework
- The IMS Gloabal Learning Consortium (IMS) created an ePortfolio Working Group in May 2003. Building on existing standards, the group developed a standardized ePortfolio data model to facilitate portability of portfolios between systems and institutions.
- Mahara is a free and open source ePortfolio system first developed via collaboration in the education community in New Zealand. Mahara is learner centred – a form of Personal Learning Environment, with social networking and the capability to form groups and group portfolios. Pan-sector learner communities can be supported using Mahara and there is seamless single sign-on with Moodle out of the box. eLearning specialists, Flexible Learning Network, and open source developers, Catalyst IT, lead the open source Mahara community project.
- The Open Source Portfolio (OSP) is a collaborative effort to create a more robust electronic portfolio application through the combined efforts of the open source community. OSP provides users non-proprietary, open-source electronic portfolio application.
|
Europass
All the five element of Europass could be part of an ePortfolio (see the Learner Information category to get more information about this specification): - The Europass CV, which is the backbone of the whole portfolio. With a common structure in all languages, it helps people highlight their competences. It is the most frequently used Europass document.
- The Europass Language Passport allows a detailed description of language skills, which in today’s Europe are more important than ever. This document is part of the more comprehensive European Language Portfolio, a tool developed by the Council of Europe.
- The Europass Mobility is a record of experiences of transnational mobility for learning purposes – in vocational training as well as in higher education. It is completed by the home and host organisation that are involved in the mobility project.
- The Europass Diploma Supplement is issued along with a higher education diploma, by the same university or institution. It outlines the student’s educational pathway, making it easier to understand, in particular for potential employers.
- The Europass Certificate Supplement is issued along with a vocational education and training certificate, to clarify the competences acquired by the person who holds the certificate. Its production is a responsibility of national authorities.
|
Terms of use
X
These contents have been obtained from the hResume Web Site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the hResume Web site for additional information on terms of use.
Print
Microformats
|
hResume is a microformat for publishing resumes and CVs. hResume is one of several open microformat standards suitable for embedding in HTML, XHTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML.
The hResume format is based on a set of fields common to numerous resumes published on the web. |
Microformats
Microformats are small patterns of HTML to represent commonly published things like people, events, blog posts, reviews and tags in web pages. They enable the publishing of information on the Web; to provide feeds and APIs for the information in websites. |
Copyright and Patents
Since the author(s) released this work into the public domain, in order to maintain this work's public domain status, all contributors to this page agree to release their contributions to this page to the public domain as well.
This specification is subject to a royalty free patent policy, e.g. per the W3C Patent Policy, and IETF RFC3667 & RFC3668. |
Terms of use
X
These contents have been obtained from the IMS Global Learning Consortium official Web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the IMS Global Learning Consortium official Web site for additional information on terms of use
Print
IMS Global Learning Consortium
|
The development of this specification was initiated because existing systems store ePortfolios in formats that do not reflect accepted open standards, and have no facilities for importing and exporting ePortfolio information conformant with accepted standards. This makes it difficult or impossible to move ePortfolios intact between systems, and leads to inefficiency and redundancy when integrating ePortfolio tools with other enterprise systems.
ePortfolios need to be portable to ensure the educational continuity between programs within an educational institution that use ePortfolios, the integration of evidence about learning over time, and the smooth transfer of verifiable information about learning and evaluation between institutions, levels of education, and employers. From an individual perspective, information about and artifacts of a person's performance and achievement, as recorded in an ePortfolio, need to operate across institutions and countries throughout their lifetime.
The IMS ePortfolio specification was created to make ePortfolios interoperable across different systems and institutions. The ePortfolio specification:- Supports the advancement of lifelong learning important to many government initiatives.
- Makes exchanging portfolios from school to work transitions easier.
- Allows educators and institutions to better track competencies.
- Enhances the learning experience and improves employee development.
IMS ePortfolio Specification Web Site |
Terms of use
X
These contents have been obtained from the Leap2A wiki and edited for presentation. Please refer to the JISC official Web site for additional information on terms of use.
Print
General Information
Joint Information Systems Committee
|
Leap2A is an outcome of the JISC CETIS (JISC Innovation Support Centre - Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards) project called InterOperability Project. It sets up the framework for the ePortfolio data interoperability.
This specification is intended to cover the representation of several kinds of information, centred around individuals, who collect, create and use their own information. Much of this information is typically of the kind that can be used for individuals' learning, but rather than being learning materials authored by an educator, the information covered by this specification is authored by the individuals themselves, about themselves. The individual, whether pupil, student, apprentice, employee or none of these, may be thought of as a learner for our purposes. If a learner reflects, on the information collected, or on other things, the expression of that reflection will be one kind of information that will take a natural place among the other kinds of information dealt with here.
The learner may also make selections from this information for presentation to other people, serving as evidence of the learner's learning, abilities, achievements, etc. The information is therefore considered for our purposes to be portfolio information, the learner may be thought of as the portfolio holder, and each presentation as a portfolio. Portfolio holders may not own all the information presented, but they will typically control access to it by others. Digital artefacts created or authored by the learner are one important category of information that can be used in electronic portfolios, and that therefore is covered by this specification.
It is not the purpose of this specification to cover information gathered by others about an individual, over which that individual has no access or control.
One of the ways in which learners express their reflections, and may record other information, is through blogs (weblogs). The Atom Syndication Format is a ubiquitous specification covering blogs, and it is designed to be extensible, so it has been chosen as the basis of this present specification. Atom by itself does not provide a rich enough vocabulary to distinguish all the significantly different kinds of portfolio information. This specification selects from Atom and extends it, to be able to represent the needed distinctions.
This specification is intended to be permissive rather than exclusive. It specifies what may be "expected" in a transfer of portfolio information as specified. Very few elements are mandatory, except where specified as mandatory within Atom. Other elements may be present, and should not cause processing errors, but may not be interpreted correctly, or at all. |
Relationship to LEAP 2.0
Leap2A is the specification, based on Atom, developed and agreed by the partner developers. LEAP 2.0 is a wider, forward-looking framework, assembled by Simon Grant using ideas from many others, and kept up to date to reflect all developments in Leap2A. LEAP 2.0 is more clearly directly based on Semantic Web concepts, and does not have the validity of having been agreed or implemented by anyone. LEAP 2.0 therefore acts as a conceptual testing ground, where ideas can be put in place ready for possible agreement and adoption within Leap2A. Leap2A is agreed and relatively stable, currently being steadily extended, but LEAP 2.0 constructs that are not part of Leap2A may be changed or abandoned at any time, when new insight or agreement emerges. |
| This category includes a number of specifications and recommendations related to the ePortfolio area which either are not targeted specifically to the learning technologies field either have been developed by institutions not specifically focused to defining standards. |
ePIX
The ePortfolio Interoperability XML (EPIX) Specification was created to support a standard protocol for the integration of disparate applications, to support the integration of ePortfolio applications with other enterprise and personal systems, as well as to manage transportability of ePortfolios and the items contained within the ePortfolio across computing devices.
EPIX is a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)-based API (application program interface) that leverages both XML and web-services to specifically support the needs of ePortfolio system interaction and integration.
The EPIX specification was defined by ePortaro, Inc. ePortaro retains the copyright to the specification and users may obtain a free license after accepting certain conditions.
EPIX has never been implemented outside ePortaro. It seems that it has not been maintained since its publication in 2003 and ePortaro has no longer been maintained since 2006. |
|