Information Architecture for Outcomes-Based Learning: Enabling Large Scale Use of e-Portfolio for Education and Lifelong Learning
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| IMS Global Learning Consortium |
The Vision
More and more of documented learning experiences will be available in electronic form as we move into the future. Currently, a relatively small number of leading institutions use documented outcomes to organize a program of study and monitor achievement. Some of these leading organizations are beginning to use online course management systems (CMSs, LMSs, VLEs) and e-Portfolios to capture results of learning experiences that may enable better understanding of a student’s achievements and therefore better placement into jobs or further study.
The e-Portfolio is also viewed as a potential lifelong repository of documented learning experiences for individuals, potentially changing the form of the traditional “resume.” In the future we will no doubt continue to evolve to better ways to achieve a good fit between employer and job seeker with or without formal e-Portfolios. But, educational institutions and schools that can help their students develop such e-Portfolios will no doubt be providing exceptional service to students, academic advisors, and potential employers.
The Challenges to the Vision
The most significant challenge to this vision can be summarized in the following problem statement:
“How can we enable institutions, teachers, and students to make the use of e-Portfolios as “easy” and “accepted” and “ubiquitous” as the current predominant practice of grade reports and test scores?”
There is absolutely no doubt, based on experience, that a grant-funded initiative can implement e-Portfolios for a course, program of study, or even across a region. But such efforts generally have utilized a separate application/repository that requires additional effort for the students and teachers to populate and maintain. Another option has been to use the e-Portfolio applications that are bundled with course management systems. But these applications tend to lock the institution into a system that works well within the context of the specific course management product, but has limited use outside that specific course or program.
Moving to the next era in which it becomes commonplace to see the use of e-Portfolios providing greater payback than the effort put in faces several challenges:
- Can we make it easy for teachers and faculty to establish and track to learning outcomes using information technology, minimizing manual set-up and logging?
- Can we make it easy for students and teachers to collect artifacts from the student learning experience in a digital format that is easy to manipulate across the several cooperating systems used in the typical digital support for learning (such as course management systems, classroom management & capture systems, e-Portfolio software, and assessment software)?
- Can we make it easy for students to interact with potential employers or institutions of further study using the e-Portfolio construct so that it is at least as easy and more effective than current screening and selection using resumes and transcripts?
- Can students easily assemble an e-Portfolio across multiple education and life experiences so it can serve as a lifelong asset ingesting data from other e-Portfolios that are mandated inside specific learning experiences?
How to Best Address Overcome the Challenges
It takes significant resources and cooperation to address the challenges to achieving the vision. Government-funded initiatives tend to focus on one specific identified need and will tend not to address this big picture scenario. Most suppliers, while interested, have limited resources and thus must focus their activity on a piece of the solution that results in clear additional opportunity for their products.
The IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC) intends to make progress toward the vision set out above using a phased set of activities led by education institutions, departments, or programs that are strongly committed to outcomes-based learning as one of the key distinctive features in defining their approach to education. Such organizations are relatively rare but growing around the globe. They are committed to providing superior student learning and career or academic placement through program design that provides transparency to students, potential students, governments, and employers with respect to the qualifications successful students will have met at completion. This creates a standard practice that can form the basis of an e-Portfolio-based approach - a more granular and meaningful level than a set of course names and grades as is predominant today. Such institutions will serve as the motivated experts that can succ essfully lead this type of effort. In addition, we invite interested suppliers to implement live systems using interoperability standards that can be replicated by other interested parties.
Applicable Interoperability Standards
Development of a major new set of interoperability standards is not expected as part of this activity. That is because the focus will be on applying existing standards. IMS standards to be applied include:
- Common Cartridge
- Learning Tools Interoperability
- e-Portfolio
- Reusable Definition of Competencies and Educational Objectives
- Learner Information Profile
- Learning Information Services
The work will refine existing versions of these standards as needed to achieve testable interoperability between:
- e-Portfolio applications
- Course Management applications
- Course & curricular design applications
- Assessment Applications
- Degree audit applications
- Recruitment applications
Phase One Participation
The outcomes expected from phase one will include:
- A joint paper that defines the needed applications and interoperability flows to establish an information architecture for Outcomes-Based Learning
- Application of the IMS standards to implement interoperability between course management systems and e-Portfolio systems
Participation in phase one of the project requires status as an educational institution, department, or program, a commitment to outcomes-based learning as a distinguishing characteristic, and demonstrated experience of at least three years in using e-Portfolio and course management software to facilitate teaching, learning, and documentation of outcomes. Interested suppliers are also invited to participate along with their institutional customers that meet the above criteria.
Based on the success of phase one, later phases will conduct additional interoperability testing among a wider set of participants to formalize the revision of the IMS standards as required.
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