Exploring ePortfolios at UCT

I use Evernote quite often to keep track of ideas, recipes, grocery lists and books/films I want to see.  Evernote works pretty seemlessly between my desktop and my mobile which means I can acccess and edit my notes at anytime.  I was interested to see the Evernote for education website and this interesting article on using Evernote as an eportfolio tool.  

In all honesty, I never really even considered Evernote to be a candidate for eportfolios.  However consdering the usability of the tool in terms of creating, organising and editing notes, fusing audio and visual media within the notes, mobile app integration and sharing individual notes as well as entire notebooks, I now see how it might be very useful as an eportfolio platform.  I imagine that many students walking around with tablets and laptops are using Evernote for in class notetaking (I know that a number of my colleagues do so) so it seems Evernote notebooks could be set up to showcase students work.  

The idea was written about in 2009 by Martin Hawksey at JISC.  Since then a number of improvements have been made to the Evernote system which I believe could make it ever more appplicable to eportfolios.    You can follow the implementation of Evernote eportfolios in an elementary school on Rob van Nood's blog.  

I have been exploring the Adobe Acrobat X Pro e-portfolio tool.  The Adobe Acrobat X Pro e-portfolio is basically a container for a variety of digital objects.  One can drag and drop various multimedia files, office documents and text files into the program which will then present these files in a dynamic fashion.  My initial reaction was that the program was basically offering nothing more than a glorified file management tool.  Yet I do appreciate the fact that allows the user to quickly combine files, package them together and create a single portfolio file.  

There is a quick video overview of the Adobe feature set for e-portfolios at the top of this webpage.  Note that the video demo’s an older version of Adobe Acrobat Pro, but the basic functionality is quite similar.  Furthermore this blog post details the e-portfolio creation process step-by-step.  A sample e-portfolio built with Adobe is available here and can be viewed in the browser if you have Adobe installed.  

I was unable to find any scholarly reviews of Adobe as an e-portfolio tool via Google Scholar.  Adobe is frequently mentioned as a potential authoring tool, but no proper review of its integration into an e-portfolio intervention could be found.  

In as far as my limited exploration of the tool has allowed, I have weighed up the following pros and cons of using the Adobe e-portfolio tool.

The pros:

1. Easy drag and drop of files to combine into a packaged PDF
2. Handles and presents specific media files well
3. Bundles files into a single PDF file
4. Visually impressive file management and animation
5. Possible to transfer large files via Adobe Sendmail
6. Secure and private if file is independently managed

The cons:

1. Requires Acrobat Pro license to author or edit content and portfolio structure
2. Content must be authored in other applications - Adobe only deals with file handling and presentation
3. Only opens with Adobe reader - not true open standard PDF (tested against Foxit PDF reader and GDocs PDF upload)
4. Based upon Flash, rendering it un-viewable on a number of devices
5. Commenting possible, but very limited and a bit clunky
6. Some content objects can only be viewed in external applications (e.g. Office docs)
7. Save to web format produces Shockwave files
8. Requires Adobe Sendmail account to transfer large files

Based on my review, I would generally not favour building e-portfolios as PDF files in Adobe.  I believe that we want students to own the e-portfolio long after completing their studies at UCT, thus they must be able to easily update and access their portfolio without having to purchase software.  I am also quite concerned about the fact that the Adobe tool authors PDF’s which can only be opened in Adobe Reader and are based on Flash; a presentation standard which appears to be on the decline.  Although the Adobe Acrobat e-portfolio tool does simplify the process of combining and packaging files together, it falls short in terms of providing long term accessibility (edit’ability) to our users and raises significant issues around the portability of the e-portfolio. 

In 2009 as part of my masters coursework I had to create an e-learning intervention for my online learning design course.  As I was working in supporting academics share teaching materials as open educational resources, I thought I would create a website in our learning management system (based on SAKAI, project name Vula) to support academics through this process.  I created the site using the Vula wiki tool, which enables one to combine text, images, and other media and create structured pages.  It was much like creating a portfolio of my work with the presentation handled by the wiki tool. 

The e-intervention was quite a success and although it never went live or was used by academics on mass, it did turn out to be an important demonstration of my ability to create e-learning material.  As my studentship at UCT is now ending, I decided that I wanted to export the content from Vula and put it another space online which I could manage and access for the rest of my life. 

The portability of the resources one creates in university is increasingly important.  As I will soon lose access to the sites that I have had access to in the learning management system, I have begun backing up and archiving all of the documents, interactions, and other stored media which these sites entail.  It would be great if students at UCT could have access to their Vula sites for life, yet this creates an issue for the folks who support the learning management system in terms of providing accessibility and total data storage. 

Since we have been exploring Wikispaces as an e-portfolio tool, I decided to export the contents of the SAKAI wiki to Wikispaces.  I managed to copy most of the text directly from the SAKAI wiki to Wikispaces and most of the formatting, colours and layout were maintained.  I did have to reupload all of my images to Wikispaces as the Vula wiki image links do not use absolute link references.  

The Vula wiki looked like this 

After copying the content to Wikispaces the same page looked like this

 Text links were also easily copied over, although there was a small image which the SAKAI wiki uses which was problematic and had to be deleted from each link. 

The little arrow image which had to be deleted from each link:

and how the links looked once coped to Wikispaces

The little arrow just before the link had to be deleted, but the hyperlink was preserved.  

Overall, the migration of a SAKAI wiki to Wikispaces was pretty easy and only took an afternoon to migrate the 6 pages.  Wikispaces also allows me to embed Youtube video and Slideshare presentations in the Wiki.  This was really nice as the SAKAI wiki did not allow embedded content and could only handle links to those sites.  You can access my new Wikispaces wiki on creating open educational resources here.

I have been scanning some examples of e-portfolios that are openly available on the internet.  I believe there is a good argument to allow the open access of e-portfolios so that students can showcase their work to potential employers or their peers.  However, I am certain that there are many e-portfolios which are secure for access by institutions only.  So these few examples are not likely representative of the whole. 

What I do like about these few examples is that they represent a number of web services which have been proposed to be suitable for building and sharing e-portfolios.  These sites showcase e-portfolios built using basic HTML webpages, Google Sites, Wikispaces, Blogger, one designed using Flash, and one embedded into Facebook.  All of these platforms offer a significant degree of flexibility and have individual issues around access, data ownership, portability, permanence and security.

Click on the e-portfolio images below to explore the individual sites.  

The first e-portfolio example is from Clemson University and reflects on a student's experience in an education program.  It seems to be designed in basic HTML but may be built off of a template.  The e-portfolio is hosted on Clement web servers.  

The second e-portfolio example is also from Clemson University, but showcases the work of a Civil Engineering student.  This e-portfolio is built on Google Sites, a free service for building websites from Google.  The e-portfolio is thus hosted on Google web servers.  

This example is of an e-portfolio designed using Wikispaces by an educational developer/facilitator.  

This next example is designed and hosted on Blogger and represents the architectural design work of an independent consultant.  As Blogger is being used the site flows in chronological order with new posts always appearing at the top of the page.  

 The next example is designed in Flash and represents the work of a recent graduate at the Mcgill School of Architecture.  This site is hosted on the designer’s personal webspace.  

The last example is of an e-portfolio which has been embedded into Facebook.  I presume one can simply add HTML pages onto user profiles to do this (although it looks like this uses some sort of Facebook App).  This could be useful as it can be shared with Facebook networks exclusively and take advantage of Facebook features such as comments and the Like button. The e-portfolio showcases the work of a design student from the Academia Conocimiento Virtual in Puerto Rico.

I believe that one of the issues many have with e-portfolios is that there is no specific template for what they are supposed to look like. This is also one of the most exciting things, as they allow the student to present their work as they see fit.  Naturally some basic required content may be necessary within the e-portfolio if it is to be used for assessment but the look, feel and layout can be left up to the student.