E-portfolios; Reaching the Tipping Point?

I was at a Sixth Form College recently presenting our e-portfolio for NVQ assessment and was greeted by the college’s Head of Technical Support, who delighted in telling me that e-portfolios were meant to be the big technological advance of the last decade and this has never materialised. I first asked him whether it was worth my while continuing with the demonstration and then asked him what he meant by an e-portfolio and suggested that the technology that underpinned them, may have advanced over the last decade.


I might also have said that in part I shared his delight to see the ‘old concept’ of what was considered to be an e-portfolio being sufficiently challenged, that it was reaching the tipping point where it was significantly under threat.

This challenge is coming from two sources. One is from the ‘So What’ camp which I have highlighted before. If an e-portfolio is just a collection of artefacts that capture someone’s personal development, with the user being in total control of the data, a) what use it is and b) aren’t there better tools that do this like Facebook and Linked In.

The other source is relatively new but arguably even more significant. Various public bodies, notably JISC have promoted e-portfolios that are developed on open source software. This is fine if these portfolios do not contain confidential data. However if they are being used to support the assessment of competence, where that assessment potentially involves confidential information, there are growing concerns about whether these portfolios are sufficiently secure to hold this sort of data. This challenge cannot be a surprise given the origin of the software.

Our approach is that the correct position of e-portfolios needs to be somewhere in between the ‘two camps’. We believe that it is important that the learner’s feels in control of their data and we take great steps to deliver this, however to be able to support effective assessment there does need to be the ability for assessors to interact with that data in a transparent way. Similarly we also think there are great benefits to be gained from sharing technological developments between our customers, but this has to take place in an environment where the software is secure not open.

As for the demonstration it went ahead and the College is now using the e-portfolio although I remain unconvinced that the lessons from one Department’s hopefully successful implementation will be shared across the College.

It is time that JISC started to provide responsible leadership for the use of technology for FE/HE.

A couple of years ago I found myself presenting a seminar on e-portfolios alongside the person tasked, for this region, with developing good practice in technology, to support the delivery of FE/HE. He produced a bamboozling presentation on the way you could use technology like google mail and other ‘free’ software to create an e-portfolio.



His diagrams were certainly confusing to someone like me with some knowledge of e-portfolios and software development and it’s only purpose appeared to be, to demonstrate that you could do for free, what nasty commercial companies were delivering for excessive amounts of money. To my knowledge, since his presentation, no one has successfully applied this ‘blueprint’ to produce a solution that is ‘working.’ In contrast one of the FE Colleges there at the same seminar decided to buy into our solution.


It would appear from the programme for the latest JISC event ‘Towards a New Horizon: Using Technology to deliver HE in a Changing World’ that he is still mounting the same campaign. There is a session about e-portfolios which is introduced in the following way;


‘The traditional method of assignment work submission is costly in resources and imposes constraints on staff and students alike. However, most of the workable, E-Portfolio solutions available are prohibitively expensive and often difficult to set up and administer, giving no appreciable saving in cost, effort or resources. But there is another way of approaching this problem, using existing resources and knowledge, which is elegant in its simplicity – email.’


Now I accept that this maybe an introduction to a session that someone other than a JISC member of staff is delivering. However the fact that it is has been allowed to be timetabled by JISC, suggests at the very least that this is being promoted as a worthwhile approach to the region. There is also an implication that those learning institutions that are using these E-portfolio solutions are being irresponsible with public money, not least because they do not deliver any appreciable benefits and there is a simple solution,- e-mail.


I am aware that I am in danger of prejudging the session that is about to be delivered but the notion that e-mail can accommodate all the complexity of groups, roles and permissions that are required to deliver robust and quality assured assessment beggars belief. In that process e-mail has a role to play and we use it for witness testimonies to authenticate work based evidence and confirm embedded practice. However this is not without its challenges. Spam filters have a habit of ‘disrupting’ e-mails particularly where there is a complex chain of communication and addresses.


There is a reason why charges need to be made for the e-portfolios that capture effectively work based assessment. It is because to capture that process and make it simple requires highly sophisticated and well engineered technology.


JISC would serve the sector better by recognising that, rather than by giving airtime to half baked and ill thought through proposals. To return to the theme of a previous blog it is about time they found a way of working collaboratively with companies who have been developing truly elegant technology based solutions for many years.

Report on the Mahara salesperson

This week was the first time I have seen someone selling Mahara in action. Indeed it is the first time I have seen a Mahara site. Well of course I have to recognise the benefits of being able to link into Moodle, which is being used by many institutions in the UK but nobody can claim that it looks great.
Anyway here is the sales pitch. Can you really thrust proprietary software when it is quite possible that compnay's owning that software will be taken over, the implication being that of course that software will disappear, leaving the learning provider high and try. Instead you can have access to open source software which you can be assured will be always be there. No mention what state that software will be in nor how stable it is you can just have the reassurance it will be there.
You can of course if you wish pay a company like the one the salesperson was representing to help implement the software and of course if you need any other services like hosting and support we will of course be happy to oblige albeit at a fee.
Seems that institutions will swopping the so called dependence on a company where there is some guarantees on the security and availability of software with a 'relationship' with another company that will be using software over which there is ultimately little control apart from the fact you know it is 'out there' which apparently better...still struggling to see how.

A quicker way of showing what you do and having it checked

I was recently challenged by my long standing group of mates to come up with a sentence to describe an e-portfolio. The implication of their question is that I inhabit some mysterious world that requires an explanation because it is not obvious an e-portfolio is.

I imagine at the e-portfolio conference later this week there will be lots of definitions being offered although I doubt if they will be as simple as the one above.

My defintion is heavily influenced by the point that I will be making at the conference which is that the key question is not what an e-portfolio is but what it can do.