Technology Used

What technologies and/or e-tools were available to you or did you seek to develop?

Tools

As no single e-portfolio system contained all the features or the ease of use that the project required, the project commissioned an e-portfolio extension to the ioNodes software from Phosphorix Ltd, using the OSPI concepts but with the intention of developing an intuitive showcase builder based on wizards and templates.

The technical concepts developed by the SHELL project were used for the underlying structure of the EELLS 'ioNetwork'. EELLS uses ioAgents to transform student records from institutional student record systems into IMS data that is stored and accessed via the EELLS ioNetwork. This has a distributed architecture similar to SHELL but uses the latest ioNode build. The ioNodes infrastructure provides a platform for rapid development of the e-portfolio tool kit and robust service centre. Each ioNode is a web-ready service host and the ioNetwork provides resilience.

The EELLS software, ioNetwork from Phosphorix, is 100% OSS5 open source software. SHELL included a proprietary component which was factored out and replaced with open source alternative ioMorph.

EELLS inherited a data transfer model based on IMS LIP and continued to use IMS LIP for the minor changes made to the learner record.

Standards and interoperability

Conformance to standards is essential for a potentially large-scale service linking a large number of educational institutions. Unfortunately these standards can be interpreted in different ways which was evidenced through our discussions with institutional MIS providers. This together with the time constraints influenced the e-portfolio developments. While the IMS e-portfolio Specification provided a base for developments, the priority was to provide sufficient functionality to enable learners to test and evaluate the usefulness of an e-portfolio service. Mapping the EELLS e-portfolio to IMS e-portfolio will be done at a future stage when the functionality is extended.