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Building ePortfolios using ‘Cloud computing’ - CRA Newsletter
publication , ple , eportfolio
This article was written for the Centre For Recording Achievement Newsletter. The article was limited to 700 words
The years undergraduate students spend in higher education are a relatively short period of time in their lifelong learning journey, throughout which they will carry out personal and professional development planning (PDP). With this in mind, a project based at the University of Leicester set out to find a series of tools that will equip students to construct an ‘ePortfolio for life’.
The project was an investigative study into a number of non-institutionalised online environments to find the best tools that would give students a platform for lifelong PDP. The project write-up and research finding can be found at http://pleuol.wetpaint.com.
This approach to PDP uses what is known as ‘Cloud computing’, this means storing personal information online in the ‘Web cloud’. The project concluded that the students required three types of online environment for this:
- Personalised Learning Environment (PLE): an environment that can be tailored to the user’s requirements and used to maintain all the other environments.
- Web Services: used to collate developmental evidence.
- ePortfolio: used to reflect upon this evidence.
These environments are intrinsically linked, as shown in Figure 1. The Web services and ePortfolio are maintained from the PLE and the Web services feed directly into the ePortfolio, providing evidence.
Figure 1
Personalised Learning Environment
The PLE is a single-login platform from which the Web services and ePortfolio can be updated. As the name suggests it can be personalised to the user’s requirements.
The platform recommended by the project was Netvibes (www.netvibes.com), however there are other adequate environments that could be used like iGoogle (www.google.com) or PageFlakes (www.pageflakes.com).
Web Services
The Web services are distributed in the ‘Web Cloud‘ and can be used to collate developmental evidence, some examples investigated include:
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Micro-blogging services: enable the student to record ‘snapshot’ evidence of development.The service the project found most appropriate for this was Twitter (www.twitter.com) which is also a Social Networking service. Within a Social Network users can ‘follow’ one-another’s postings and offer peer support.
- Social Bookmarking: enables users to store their favourite Website’s URLs online and to create a self constructed organisational system using ‘tags’. The social element of this enables users to share their bookmarked sites with a network of peers, makeing it easier to accumulate an extended collection of developmental sites. The service the project found most appropriate for this was del.icio.us (http://delicious.com/).
ePortfolio
The ePortfolio platform the project selected had to fulfil a number of requirements, including:
- easily maintainable and manageable;
- assessable by course tutors;
- easy to integrate the evidence collected in the Web services.
The environment thought most suitable for this was a Wiki. Wikis are environments that are easy to edit using an intuitive user interface and can be expanded as required. Furthermore they have the required capabilities of an ePortfolio system such as, uploading and storing files like a CV.
The Wiki tool the project utilised was Wetpaint (www.wetpaint.com) as it fulfilled all the project’s criteria especially the integration of evidence. This was achieved by embedding RSS feeds from the various Web services into the Wiki. An RSS feed is an output from a Website that informs of any updates that have been made to that Website (Web service). It is also this technology that allowed tutors to assess student ePortfolios, as tutors could subscribe to the RSS feed from Wetpaint.
The outcomes of this project have recently been put into practice within a course programme to teach students the skills required to use these various technologies as part of the PDP process. This was delivered to all first year Biological Science students in the 2008 intake at the University of Leicester as part of a Key Skills Module.
This new and innovative approach to PDP process equipped students with the tools and skills which would be useful and effective throughout their learning journey at the University of Leicester and beyond.
