JISC

This project built on previous work undertaken by HE and FE partners in Kent and Medway as part of the Kent New Technology Institute (KNTI) initiative. Within the pedagogic strand of KNTI, collaboration began to collect and share resources to support students’ academic skills. The primary objective of the PLPP was to provide non-traditional students access to HE resources through the use of web technologies, providing services at any internet-enabled location. The portal allowed the four partner HEIs in the region to share resources with their partner FE Colleges.

Executive Summary

Within the pedagogic strand of KNTI, collaboration began to collect and share resources to support students’ academic skills. The primary objective of the PLPP was to provide non-traditional students access to HE resources through the use of web technologies, providing services at any internet-enabled location. The portal allowed the four partner HEIs in the region to share resources with their partner FE Colleges.

KNTI approaches to orientation to HE and support for developing academic skills prior to entry were linked with e-Portfolio approaches of the JISC PETAL Project at Oxford Brookes and work on Personal Development Planning (PDP) being undertaken by CCCU to deliver shared resources through a portal interface. Partner institutions could also include local resources for their users. Pilot groups from partner FE and HE institutions were to use the portal to aid transition to HE. Evaluation of the implementation of the portal was undertaken to ascertain the usefulness of this approach to supporting widening participation.

The project was tackled in three phases which necessarily overlapped:

• Phase 1 – Technical infrastructure and development of PLPP
• Phase 2 – Identification and linking of resources into PLPP
• Phase 3 – Testing and evaluation of PLPP.

The extension phase of the project, which was completed in March 2007 provided exit strategies for the e-portfolio, continued to work on shared authentication and looked at more efficient ways of sharing support resources as learning objects delivered through a metadata-driven search engine.

Wherever possible we adopted open standards and open source software.

Technical development included:

• Apache Webserver and Tomcat to provide necessary web services
• MySQL was used for both the portal and ePortfolio database
• uPortal provided the portal framework and PETAL was used for the ePortfolio system
• LOM IMS2 standards were used for learning objects
• XML documents were used to create metadata-rich files
• Only basic authentication and authorisation were achieved, though we investigated systems using LDAP and Shibboleth protocols
• KUSP Project to provide a Shibbolized portal (http://www.kent.ac.uk/is/kusp/)

Interoperability explored the extent to which the portlets from partner institutions can be linked through the portal.

• Web-based static resources were designed for portability. The use of templates was explored to test the portability of resources between institutions or into a central resource
• Web-based interactive resources should be designed in a way that enables them to be used as learning objects capable of being used within a variety of web applications such as VLEs
• The PDP system in the pilot would provide output from the e-portfolio SQL database in a form that could be imported by other institutional (PDP) systems, using emerging interoperability standards (e.g. IMS, XML)

Progress against the primary objectives of the project is summarised below:

1. Facilitating wider participation: strong partnership links were essential to the success of this project. These have been further strengthened by the staff development work, and extended through the dissemination of the project
2. Sharing support resources and services across institutions: The growing partnership between University of Kent and CCCU has demonstrated the potential for sharing expertise and resources to provide a valuable set of learning objects for non-traditional learners entering from FE and other access routes
3. Delivering tools and information from a wide range of sources to the learner at home or in the workplace: The project highlighted the difficulties of sharing resources across individual systems, even where open-source applications are being implemented
4. Identification of issues which need to be addressed to offer cross-institutional eLearning systems and services: Technical difficulties were experienced by FE institutions as a result of their infrastructure and systems. The project highlighted for where improvements needed to be made in their infrastructure if they wished to access portal-based resources. Staff development proved to be a significant requirement, not only at a technical or operational level but also at a pedagogic one.

In addition, during the extension phase:

1. Providing staff and students with continuing technical and development support until the end of their course of study, thus enhancing our evaluation of the portal. i.e. until February 2007

A further pilot group started in February 2006, and assessing the progress of this group added value to the earlier evaluation work.

2. At the end of the students’ period of study producing an exit strategy for the material entered into the e-portfolio to enable them to take their materials with them as they transfer to HE.

Without firm interoperability standards for the transfer of e-portfolio data, we investigated the most efficient and useful means of enabling students to transfer data to any potential new portfolio system.

3. Offering students and staff, who do not have access to the portal, the learning resources produced in the first phase of the project.

The conference in March 30, 2006 demonstrated interest from a number of institutions and organisations other than those involved in the initial project, e.g. the University College of the Creative Arts and we continued to explore other users’ needs within the region.

4. Sharing resources with students in partner institutions beyond the portal we will explore a solution, through which the learning resource component of PLPP can be made portable to other institutions’ learning system or web sites.

The learning materials within PLPP have been developed into stand-alone learning objects accessed through an interface that allows other institutions to select and re-contextualise the materials for their own students.

5. Through research and contact with other agencies, Rehash. L10 to national initiatives if appropriate e.g. JORUM and through the involvement of the University of Kent in the LearnHigher CETL we will both link to and offer PLPP resources.

The project has worked closely with JORUM and is offering core learning objects through the JORUM repository.

The short time-scale of this project set up an unrealistic expectation for the full implementation of portal technology, most crucially seamless authentication of users to the portlets. This work is now the focus of the Kent University Shibbolized Portal (KUSP) project using further support from JISC. Even the most committed of institutions take time to embrace and embed change. Tutors require time to adjust to new concepts and skills, which in turn they relay to students. Attempting to artificially accelerate the development process, inevitably results in tensions and misunderstandings amongst tutors and students. JISC extension funding will allow the implementation to proceed around the pattern of an academic year.

In addition to a better understanding of the technical and logistic issues around portal technology to facilitate sharing resources, two HE institutions, sharing a common goal of supporting widening participation in a region, have demonstrated the benefits of collaboration for themselves, their partner institutions and potential students.