Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

I gave a talk at the NITLE West Coast meeting in Portland, OR on Wesleyan’s Electronic Portfolio. Most of my talk consisted of describing the genesis of the Electronic Portfolio project – the Curricular Renewal Legislation that the faculty passed in April 1998 and doing a show and tell of a student and faculty portfolios. Marty Ringle, who is the Chief Technology Officer at Reed College, and the organizer of this meeting asked the presenters to send him our presentation materials. Of course, I did not have any powerpoint slides to send him. So, I thought I should summarize what I talked about it in here and share it with others who attended, who can then add anything that I missed.

• Based on the faculty legislation, we were asked to develop an Electronic Portfolio. Billy Weitzer from Academic Affairs and I co-directed the project.
• We convened an advisory group consisting of faculty, students and staff to advise us on the design of the product. This is absolutely critical to the process.
• Our goal was to create a space that would contain administrative and academic information that would be useful for both the students and the faculty advisors and provide a space for students to store their work, both curricular and co-curricular. For example, showing course schedule, academic history, student billing are examples of applications for showing information; we also developed an interface encouraging the students to post their writings, artwork and music;
• The version also should understand the advisee-advisor relationship and provide the advisor access to the advisee’s portfolios.
• The very first version was developed using Lotus Notes from IBM because it satisfied our technical specifications – easily configure the user interface with all securities built in. We wrote extensive scripts that updated the Lotus security tables with information extracted from PeopleSoft and other sources on a nightly basis. The easy to use GUI helped us create web pages to serve the data; it also provided a nice interface to add security to various applications so that only relevant applications were shown to the user.
• This system also was developed to have up to 5 guest accounts per student so that they can share a selected subset of applicaitons with their parents, prospective employers etc.
• The original architecture was developed under the premise that as new technologies evolved, we should be able to transition to them without any major rewrites of the applications. So, the applications themselves were developed as CGIs, using a templating system which were used to define the page layout.
• As a result of this, when Lotus licensing changed, we rewrote the portfolio and security management in a way that all underlying applications continued to work.
• Our initial rollout was in late 2000 for the class of 2001. Our attempts to train failed, because many users did not need any training for a fully web based product.
• Approximately in 2004, both the EPC (Educational Policy Committee) and WSA (Wesleyan Student Assembly) began getting involved in looking at the information architecture of the portfolio and advised us to redo the layout. This is key to the process – users thinking about the value that the product adds to them and advising us on how to make it better.
• Once various constituents began seeing the power of the product, requests for having other types portfolio began poring in. Employee portfolio, for example, is a collection of many of the administrative applications for employees. We have modeled the Supervisor-Supervisee relationship in an employee portfolio after the advisor-advisee replationship.
• Within ITS, after an initial reluctance to adapt E-Portfolio, all application programmers now develop all applications requiring authentication for E-Portfolio. We have now a framework and the underlying applications are from a wide variety of programming platforms. We also use this framework to integrate the E-portfolio with external systems such as Blackboard, Voyager (library catalog), PowerFaids etc.
• We are now in the process of redesigning the portfolios to make them compatible with new portal like interface, allowing the user more control over the layout.
• We will also be spending considerable effort in the information management – applications are properly labeled, easily searchable, explained well, introduced only for the time that they are relevant etc.
• The E-portfolio is managed via the Portfolio Maker, which is a web based application; it also comes with an application generator in Perl which abstracts a lot of routine initial calls so that the application developer is provided with the skeleton to develop the actual application.
• We also host an instance of Portfolio for COFHE (Consortium on Financing Higher Education)

You can see a list of applications available in a typical student portfolio here.  If you click on the Sample Student Portfolio in the top frame, you can navigate the portfolio applicaitons which show dummy data.

Please feel free to comment – questions are welcome; also, if I left out anything important, please feel free to let the others know.