And as corollary, how does it compare to a Wordpress install or a CMS?
What's the best open source e-Portfolio tool for teaching?
(7 posts) (5 voices)-
Posted 6 years ago Permalink
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My first thought: "What is an ePortfolio?"
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest forgetting the term, asking instead what the goals are, audience, use cases, etc. Then, ask what's the best tool for that.
That probably comes off as a grumpy non-answer. But, really, I think that'll guide you more quickly to what you need. I just see too many very different uses of the term "ePortfolio".
Posted 6 years ago Permalink -
Replying to @Patrick Murray-John's post:
It might come across as a grumpy answer, but if it does then I'll just back you up—that was my internal response when I first read the question. If the university/department/program has adopted the term "ePortfolio" in their requirements for instructors, then it is very likely that they have something specific in mind. For example, at WSU people talked about "ePortfolios" and what they really meant was "student documents stored in SharePoint because that's what the administrators paid a bucketload of money for".
But if that's not the case, then yeah, I'd start by thinking about audience, purpose, sustainability, distribution and work from there.
Posted 6 years ago Permalink -
I guess what I was looking for was a place where I can conduct my class work in an open space that also could moonlight as my teaching portfolio. Here at UVa we use an instantiation of Sakai called Collab. It does everything you can expect it too, calendar, gradebook, chatrooms, wikis, etc., etc., but it is internal to the university and I can't really display it to the world. I heard about these e-Portfolios yesterday for the first time from a book that just came out called The Teaching Portfolio. The book pointed me in the direction of some promising open source tools that claim to simplify this process: Foliospaces, Rcampus, elgg, etc. Before I tried all of these things I wanted to get a sense of their usefulness from the DH community. It seems that Mark Sample's GMU setup, or Amanda French's eclectic approach are good and clean solutions to conducting class business, and I was wondering what these sorts of more elaborate tools can add to the equation. If the goal is to just have a running record of your classes in the same place where students share their work (with the right permissions from them of course), then these last solutions might be all a body needs. Joe Gilbert also pointed me in the direction of OpenScholar, which I'm exploring right now.
Posted 6 years ago Permalink -
Replying to @elotroalex's post:
Ah! Given that, I'd suggest using WordPress, either your own installation or asking if SHANTI has something set up. Here's some more examples of WordPress in teaching. The key thing to me is the customizability to what you need it to do for your own teaching needs, and for that, plus ease of setup and use, I don't think you can beat WordPress.
Especially if you are thinking of combining the teaching activities there with your teaching portfolio, making it do what you want it to do sounds essential, and your own installation of WP lets you customize away with plugins, themes, etc. I'm not sure what the other options offer out of the box, but WP can certainly do some pretty interesting things beyond the running record and sharing. When ScholarPress gets built up over the next year, there should be some extra-neat possibilities.
Hope that helps
Posted 6 years ago Permalink -
hopegreenberg
MemberThe ePortfolio question is a recurring theme here at UVM. It's been defined by different people at different times as:
- a place for students to collect all their work to use for their own reference, to see how their own work has evolved and to keep examples handy for later use or evidence of achievement (i.e. student control and use - my personal favorite definition)
- a collection of "best work" by students that teachers or administrators can use for assessment purposes (Vermont has a long history of K-12 use in this area, at least it did before the "multiple choice test assessment" model was thrust upon us)
- a collection of best work by instructors to use for their own professional development and as evidence for promotionI'd be very interested in seeing more comments on the topic here.
Our College of Education has used TaskStream (www.taskstream.com - not free) for its pre-service teachers. I used to teach a short course on building a portfolio on the web for our grad college students, and our Honors College has considered using a Blackboard building-block/plugin for their students. The challenges in all these cases have been 1) choosing something that is neither too constraining (never has all the possibilities you want) nor too open (makes it hard to organize consistently among all users), and 2) finding concensus about what should be adopted when each of the three models described above is seen as the "one true way."
Posted 6 years ago Permalink -
maximiseict@gmail.com
MemberTwo separate issues running here: Firstly, the old chestnut of why different institutions have differing views concerning ePortfolios. Simply, why should an ePortfolio only be designed to do one thing, such as Showcase, Assessment, Feedback etc? I wrote/presented on this issue several years ago - see http://issuu.com/efoliouk/docs/who_s_hijacking_our_e-portfolios-4 (best read in Full Screen mode)
But secondly, why open source? It is quite true that when devising an ePortfolio system a teacher/researcher might be able to create a viable OS soultion for his class, but when that same tool becomes a 1500 user account and each learner is addressing their ePortfolio to some 10-15 subject areas - who is expected to manage all those accounts, manage software ubdates, man a 24/7 helpdesk, provide scaffolding, default pages and context sensitive help according to the learner's abilities and the ethos of the school? This is all part of the cost-of-ownership of OSS.
As an experienced teacher (and now running my own non-profit business) I provide a system that removes any extra work from both the teaching staff and technical support.
But, perhaps most importantly, there is a serious danger in designing a system that might meet grad college students' needs - and then somehow assuming that this model will meet the needs of school-kids.
You will find a whole host of discussion points and further links relating to ePortfolios at: http://www.efoliointheuk.blogspot.com
Posted 6 years ago Permalink
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