East of England Lifelong Learning Support
Lead Contact: Mark Leyland, mark.leyland@move.ac.uk
JISC Programme: Distributed e-Learning programme
Lead Institution and Partners: University of Hertfordshire (L), University of Luton (now University of Bedfordshire)
This case study illustrates Application, Application to Education, Defining Requirements, Interoperability, Legal Issues - Data Protection, Lifelong Learning, Institutional Perspectives, Learner Perspectives, Technologies
Background & Context
What is the background to the e-portfolio initiative?
EELLS was a JISC project funded to explore the issues and benefits of setting up a portal-based e-portfolio service for lifelong learners within the East of England region through the development of a pilot service.
The project sought to build a practical demonstration model developed from previous JISC work. The EELLS regional demonstrator was based on SHELL (Southwest Hosts Enhancing Lifelong Learning), developed at the University of Plymouth. The SHELL system had already defined specifications for student records, created working models and provided examples of good practice within this area. This regional demonstrator would be a scalable support service for learners independent of institutional systems.
EELLS uses a client-centred model of progression appropriate to lifelong learning, where ownership and control of the information is transferred from the institution to the individual but with appropriate authentication for institutional progress files. The EELLS e-portfolio therefore consists of a personal digital archive containing personal information, records of achievement and artefacts, transcript-type data supplied from official institutional transcripts, and information on the people and organisations to which the owner has granted access. This will include the provision of lifelong learner records for the presentation of learner achievements to educational establishments or employers and with utilities to facilitate the application process.
The intended market for EELLS is lifelong learners - people of any age or educational background.
What was the purpose and intended outcomes of the initiative?
The overall aim of the project was to create an e-portfolio demonstrator that could be piloted with learners within a regional context. The pilots were intended to explore the requirements of learners within the client-centred model of progression and to build learner requirements into the software development cycle to produce a service of value to learners.
Priority was given to the development of an intuitive system, suitable for learners with diverse levels of IT skills, to facilitate the creation of various types of e-portfolio that could be shared with other people.
The functionality would include accessing learner records, personal development planning tools, CV builder and publisher and uploading files to a secure repository.
How was the initiative implemented?
The EELLS e-portfolio was split into the following five tools available from the menu-driven learner portal. These are:
- File repository (artefact upload and storage)
- Learner records (transcript-type data from the institutional MIS)
- Showcase and CV builder tools (presentational materials)
- Personal development planning (PDP) tool (generic framework taken from the Learning Matrix project)
- Course catalogue
Two Administration portals were developed for the management of learner records by system administrators and the EELLS Project Team. Some of the utilities developed have been adopted and used by other JISC DEL projects. These are the learner administration portal and the system management portal (ioAgent/ioNode administration).
The issue of data protection was considered at the planning stage of the project and all applications were developed with this in mind. Students participating in the pilots were required to sign a data consent form outlining the data protection policy for the EELLS e-portfolio system. The intention was to replace this with an electronic recording and notification system.
The project ran a number of pilots with learner groups from the partner institutions which attempted to explore their requirements. The evaluation centred on making the service available to a number of volunteer learners and observing them using the system, collecting usage data and inviting discussion and feedback around their experiences of using the system. Different data were collected including observation data, collection of learner data, survey data, focus group data and user interface evaluation data. The sample size was not as large as anticipated due to the constraints of the project although there was a good mix of both academic and vocational students. However not many part-time students took part and no full-time work learners were involved.
