North East regional collaboration around e-portfolio progression pathways with illustrative case studies
Lead Contact: Lawrence Taylor, Lawrence.Taylor@unn.ac.uk
JISC Programme: DeL Regional Pilot Project Projects
Lead Institution and Partners: HE: Newcastle University (L), University of Durham, University of Northumbria, University of Sunderland, University of Teesside
FE: City of Sunderland College, Stockton Riverside College, Tyne Metropolitan and other FE institutions in the region through close collaboration with the aforementioned Universities and the OWL Project.
This case study illustrates Application, Application to Employment, Authentication, Community of Practice, Internationalisation, Interoperability, Professional Body Perspectives, Tutor Perspectives, Web 2.0, Institutional Perspectives
Background & Context
What is the background to the e-portfolio initiative?
The EPICS project was a collaboration of representatives from within the FE and HE sectors in the North East to develop a scalable and sustainable regional pilot project building on local excellent practice in personal development planning (PDP) and e-portfolios to support learners at all levels of post-16 education. Enhancing the learning experience by supporting the individual needs of each learner is at the heart of this development, along with permanently embedding collaboration in regional activity.
Excellent practice in PDP for supporting learning and use of e-portfolios already exists in the region, including the ePET project to make tools available to the sector as a whole. NorMAN is a region-wide collaboration involving Universities of the North East. NorMAN contributes significantly to the JANET (Joint Academic Network) strategy of providing a national multi-service broadband communications backbone, and provides regional communications linkage that interconnects the five universities.
Crucially, the region is also leading in the development of Shibboleth and core middleware technologies with particular emphasis on supporting students in clinical practice or work-based learning.
What were the aim and objectives of the initiative?
The project's aim was to raise the quality of the learning experience by establishing PDP tools to facilitate an individual's educational progression, assuring that investment in reflection is preserved between agencies thus removing a significant barrier to uptake. This pilot aimed to identify the base requirements needed to transfer a minimum data set, based on good practice in the rapid and efficient transfer of student data established within the SHELL project.
The aim of the collaboration was to extend the regional partnership through active engagement and dissemination of illustrative case studies and to learn from parallel activities elsewhere.
How was the initiative implemented?
The EPICS project sought to provide a pilot study designed to develop, test and evaluate a practical approach, building on existing tools, to implement a region-wide infrastructure for the easy transfer of individual progress file, e-portfolio and PDP information across a range of agencies and institutions.
The project was divided into 4 stages: 1) project start-up, planning and project controls; 2) definition of design and technical elements of the project; 3) systems and application build and deployment; 4) dissemination and events.
A key aspect of implementation was establishing an effective regional partnership where the various staff involved were grouped into appropriate delivery areas (based around the work packages of the project stages). It was clear that engagement was an important challenge to be addressed. Regional discovery workshops involving partners across HE and FE were run to explore issues around e-portfolios and the institutional challenges of developing PDP within their institutions. A clear message that came through was the need to establish a regional PDP forum to address key issues and provide a sustainable framework for e-portfolio development in the North East. In order to maximise regional involvement, in particular that of FE institutions, it was agreed that it would be advantageous to involve the OWL Consortium.
A requirements analysis of partners revealed the complexity of the data flow between systems within the individual institutions. Each partner institution provided a detailed breakdown of their current systems and working practices. These questionnaires were analysed in order to seek out the commonalities in PDP, e-portfolio and legal practice between the institutions. From this analysis, partner institutions were asked to provide hypothetical learner cases. The learner cases were designed to ensure that the transference of data would be tested across all platforms being utilised in the project i.e. Blackboard, ePET and PebblePad, and to ensure that data flowed both ways, e.g. ePET to ePET, ePET to Blackboard, Blackboard to ePET.
Full details of the specifications/requirements of individual partners is available in the final report (See Further Resources).
