Draft myWORLD Final Report Posted

A draft final report for the myWORLD project has been posted here.

We found PETAL/OSP has great potential as an institutional e-portfolio but must, critically, be more adaptable to the user’s skill, confidence and (digital/academic) literacy level/ability, among other things. OSPv1.5 was not good enough. We recommend waiting for 2.2.1 on Sakai. However, that may be best suited to larger institutions with high IT readiness factors. We are investigating ASP, facilitated models of use for smaller institutions. We also advise developing “simple” appropriate technology solutions in parallel, e.g. php “CV Builder” as a Moodle activity; experiment with many social softwares, repositories, collaboration tools, webtops, environments.

Executive Summary

my WORLD and Petal 2 emerged from the JISC Distributed e-Learning Tools (DeL Tools) project known as Petal. In this family of projects we set out to adapt, implement and trial the Open Source Portfolio (OSP) in a range of post compulsory educational contexts:

• Higher Education, Oxford Brookes University, Health and Social Care: “Fit for Practice” – E-portfolios as tools in competency assessment for future social workers, University of Brighton, Arts and Music Degree
• Further Education: Abingdon and Witney College, tutorial process on an Access to HE course; Plumpton College, Wine Studies, Mature students HND – BA/Sc level; Sussex Downs College, HND applied multimedia
• Adult Community Education: Community University Partnership Project (CUPP), Refugees – Variety of literacy levels plus ESOL; CUPP, Community Arts – Entry level literacy; Oxon CLSU – CV creator for employability
• Professional Institutes: CILIP, e-portfolios for practical use by a professional body; CMI, e-portfolio for Chartered Professionals; CIPD: e-Portfolio alternative to CV; ALT: Learning Technology Professionals accreditation programme.

We aimed:

• to develop a stable installation configuration of the OSP e-Portfolio tool and pilot this installation on at least four servers
• to enable localisation of the user interface and underlying data hierarchy
• to conduct 10 case studies across Southern Britain working with up to 100 end users and to evaluate these use cases and their impact on learners and institutions
• to enrich the e-portfolio building experience for the learner by integrating a Web Services interface into the Open Source Portfolio (OSP)-based Petal service.

We hit...

... a messy world where theories have not yet emerged, tightly coded, where conflicts of interest abound and where there is always more that could be done. e-Portfolios are being introduced into a climate of rapid innovation. The introduction of many new technologies leaves any one of them competing for limited learner and teacher time and tolerance.

Project issues

This was a complex project. the “vision” was fragmented across sites. None the less, learners in community, further and higher education, and professional institute contexts were introduced to and in some cases used e-portfolio and personal development planning systems based on and derived from OSP to prepare CVs an e-portfolio collections.

We learned that pilot projects are hard and people are the key. It is an important point of principle that portfolio outcomes belong first to the people who compile them. Although not always obvious, the compiling, keeping and using a portfolio is a community activity. It follows that it is necessary for project teams to participate in the life of the community within which portfolios are being used in order that there be meaningful learner progression.

OSP issues

Although the software is open source, the configuration, systems admin and web deployment skills needed to build out the components were not as widely available as we had hoped. There were parts of the OSPv1.5 application that did not work well, particularly the “publish hierarchy” function. And, OSPv1.5’s pedagogical assumptions served to narrow the field of applicability considerably. The interface, without intending to, alienated many users outside the higher education sector, and outside the more discursive fields. Interface design has too long been left too late in the development cycle.