Ownership of the e-Portfolio

Concerns about exploitation centre around access rights and ownership of the portfolio. The consensus is that the learner owns their portfolio (although this is not the case in a legal sense) and controls the access rights. This means that physically storing a portfolio does not give rights to publish. We need to remember that reflection is very personal and it must be the decision of the students as to whether to publish (restricted publishing/blog type) such material. Charlesworth and Home in the Legal Aspects of e-Portfolio Systems: A Short FAQ suggest that the relationship of an institution to the learners' data should be that of 'stewardship' - the assumption of responsibility for the proper management of learner data.

Anyone using an e-portfolio system would need to abide by the regulations of the storage owner. At present this would probably be a school, college or university; although Nottingham Passport is local authority hosted and is recognised throughout Nottingham. When producing regulations and guidance you will need to take into account the changing relationship between learners, teacher, institution, government and European principles. Most probably individuals will choose different places for storage of their portfolio depending upon their current circumstances. These issues are discussed in Matt Barton's blog article.

The adoption of standards such as UKLeaP (the UK specific implementation of the IMS LIP standard) ensures that the core of a portfolio will be easily transferred from provider to provider. A JISC-funded project undertaken by Nottingham University and partners showed that this is possible in practice. There are, however, some documents your student would not be able to amend, for example the student transcript.

You should consider all of the above, agree an institutional view, and include as part of your specification for a system. If you are working with other institutions to supporting lifelong learning then you will need intra institutional agreements and consider the Data Protection Act (see the section on legal issues).

Pedagogical and social issues were the theme for the fifth meeting of the CETIS Pedagogy Forum.