Success Factors

What are the key outcomes of the initiative?

Establishing collaboration with all involved partners was essential for the project to deliver a critical level of uptake of connected services. As a result the project became as much about the management and pedagogy of e-portfolios as the technology. Exploring and understanding the nature of a regional project such as this became a key learning point for the EPICS project.

The implementation of the technical framework uses standard web-based interfaces. This implementation has proved to be a success making access to these systems possible from any web browser device connected to the internet.

The project has developed and produced an agreed base-level technical schema to test the portability of learner e-portfolios between several e-portfolio tools, these applications are:

• Blackboard a commercial VLE
• e-PET an open source e-portfolio tool developed at Newcastle University
• PebblePad an e-portfolio tool from Pebble Learning

The EPICS project has also developed:

• An e-portfolio governance toolkit which offers a set of concepts for those attempting to implement e-portfolios/PDP to take a more informed approach to the design and deployment of such innovations within and between institutions
• A sustainable regional community of interest in the context of e-portfolio/PDP
• A re-balancing of the notion of e-portfolios around issues of management and pedagogy as well as technology

The governance toolkit has been made available to a number of institutions, both involved in the project and others in the region through the regional dissemination event.

Organisational Outcomes

Activities such as the discovery workshop and the regional PDP Forums were very successful in collaborating across various institutions with a shared common interest in e-portfolios and personal development planning.

The EPICS project was also successful in developing an effective regional team especially given the diversity and geographical extent of the project and institutions involved. As a result of the collaboration set up for the EPICS project, the Regional Forum looked to take forward collaborative activity to evaluate portfolios through links with the ELLI project.

Knowledge Outcomes

EPICS has made a valuable contribution to exploring this issues involved in data transfer between institutions, a key area of e-portfolio implementation. For example, it highlighted the legal issues such as Data Protection, as well as the difficulties relating to particular systems, for example around data import and export. However, the project discovered that the process could be simplified by transferring only selected data from one e-portfolio system to another rather than the entire contents of each e-portfolio.

Software Development

The development of software solutions was beyond the scope of the project. However it was felt that basic XSL transforms could be developed in an exploratory fashion so as to ascertain what would be entailed in the data transfer between systems. These transforms were suitably developed and tested, and it was felt that the knowledge gained and the transforms themselves were very valuable and could definitely address the issues of importing IMS LIP data into Blackboard. The transforms also achieved an almost perfect separation of data from format (in the XHTML pages) and hence performed excellently from the point of view of accessibility, cross-browser compatibility, and thanks to the pertinent use of tagging in the XHTML pages, the ability to extract relevant data from the resulting files. All of these features point the way to how to develop excellent future solutions to the data transfer problem.

Work was undertaken with the international "Europass CV" standard (http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/) as an additional way of transferring portfolio data in the region and wider European context. ePET can now export and import XML data in the Europass-CV standard. This was demonstrated at the Plugfest at the "ePortfolios 2006" conference in Oxford 11th - 13th October and involved the export of CV data from ePET in Europass-CV xml, which was uploaded in the Europass website.

What follow-up activity will be/has been carried out as a result of the project?

An important part of EPICS was the communications strategy, which defined how EPICS would evaluate and disseminate the project outputs and deliverables. The communications strategy was very successful, with the implementation and deployment of a number of communications tools including a number of dissemination events and the e-portfolio Governance Toolkit.

The EPICS-2 project built on the success of EPICS which helped develop a strong regional collaboration in the North East around technology, pedagogy and governance of e-portfolios and PDP. The EPICS-2 project aimed to make a significant impact on the development of support for personalised learning, work-based learning, and lifelong learning.