Technology Used

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

A number of e-portfolio tools were selected to use at different partner institutions in the ISLE project. These were the Blackboard system, Open Source Portfolio (OSP) system, SELF system, PebblePad, the Angus in-house system and WordPress. Over the two-year period of the project, no one system emerged as clearly superior to the others from the point of view of student and tutors. Some were more attractive and easy to use than others, some require greater development time to set-up and others require a greater financial investment.

Although the focus of the project was on pedagogical rather than technical issues, a number of common systems considerations emerged for ensuring successful implementation of any of the e-portfolio tools:

• Adequate resources are needed for users to support them in the use of the system such as system tutorials and guided learning lessons. The key factor here is time
• Costs and staff resources should be assessed when it comes to system selection. Open source systems may meet requirements but are likely to need a greater amount of staff time to configure and develop
• Transferability of data between systems proved to be a key issue and further development is needed to agree interoperability standards to remove the stumbling blocks to effective e-portfolio supported PDP practice