JISC

Region: North East

Overview

The EPICS project is a collaboration of representatives throughout the North East of England (NE) educational sectors (within and between FE/HE) who propose a scalable and sustainable regional pilot project in personal development planning (PDP) and ePortfolios to support learners at all levels of post-16 education.

By investigating the currently used systems, we intend to develop, test and evaluate a practical approach, building on existing tools and good practice, to implement a region-wide infrastructure for the easy transfer of progress file, ePortfolio and personal development planning information across a range of institutions in the North East of England and centred on the individual. Outcomes include a region-wide agreed technical exchange framework and a handbook of good practice with illustrative case studies, which will be widely disseminated.  

We are doing this project as we feel that there is still considerable effort required in order to enable institutions to efficiently and effectively roll out good practice across subject areas. Additionally, there are few standards or legal, political and social structures, to support the transition from school to FE to HE, into the work place and Continued Personal Development.  

Aims and Objectives

The aim is to collaborate with representative institutions of North East (NE) educational sectors (within and between FE/HE), to extend the regional partnership through active engagement and dissemination of illustrative case studies, and to learn from parallel activities elsewhere.  

The project objectives are identified as:

• Establish a regional collaboration pilot project pledged to deliver a critical level of uptake of connected services.
• Identify the conditions necessary to create a framework within which a single ePortfolio PDP, directly linked to the individual learner, can be followed through their full lifecycle from the final secondary school years to A level and FE, through foundation courses and degrees to graduating from HE and on into the workplace, whilst providing a seamless experience to the individual learner.
• Develop a suitable technical framework to deliver the transfer of learner ePortfolio information (which may be different in each institution) between a range of educational institutions, using web based interfaces to enable access from learners’ homes, educational establishments and the workplace.
• Implement an agreed base-level technical schema to test the portability of learner ePortfolios.
• Examine the regional, legal, political and cultural issues which need to be addressed in order to offer a full progression pathway.
• Evaluate the integrated use of ePortfolio tools to support widening participation and lifelong learning, by developing 5 model case studies to illustrate how local, regional and national systems will work together to provide coherent access across educational institutions to learner portfolio information.
• Utilise Shibboleth technologies to control authorisation and authentication to learner record information, and investigate the opportunities for attribute data (from ePortfolios) to enhance Shibboleth flexibility.
• Disseminate the practical outputs of the project to other regional partnerships and JISC via the website, documentation (including a handbook and case studies), and events.

Project Methodology

The project will be managed using the most appropriate elements from PRINCE 2 and the requirements from JISC.  The elements of PRINCE 2 methodology and the requirements identified in the terms and conditions supplied by JISC, provides the project with the tools and the ability to manage the project and project risks more effectively.  It specifically encourages the formal recognition of roles and responsibilities within the project which will focus the project team members on what the project needs to deliver, why, when, for whom and within the budgets laid down and to the agreed level of quality assurance.  

By close collaboration with all of the partners, the project team will develop specific work package specifications.  The project work breakdown structure has been divided in to four stages in which the work packages, associated tasks, resources and timescale allocation will be defined in detail.   This provides the project team members with sufficient time to learn as we go and build on the skills and experiences being learnt throughout the project lifecycle. It also gives the necessary project controls allowing continued refinement of the project plan and the day to day controls with an agreed process of change management to ensure a smooth development, implementation and deployment.  

The Advisory Board is comprised of representatives from the major stakeholder groups. A project team, comprising of senior staff from the respective institutions has been established to oversee the day to day development and implementation of the project.   

All project documentation including the work packages will be validated by the project partners and refined in the light of their experiences.

All risks and issues encountered will be resolved before progressing to the next dependency work package and or stage.   

Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders

This project is important to all educational institutions as it w ill combine various and developing technologies that will support regional collaboration of North East higher and further education institutions to enable them to implement the project outcomes and to disseminate the results.  The stakeholders will benefit from this project as the collaboration of the NE higher and further education institutions will develop new working practices, procedures and processes in order to implement the deliverables and outcomes of the project.  

The evaluation is integral to engendering ownership amongst the JISC community, to gather formative and summative feedback on the project as it develops and inform all via the dissemination strategy. The proposed work should help to maximise the pedagogic advantages of devolving the responsibility for learning to subject specialists, and the quality assurance, administrative and economic advantages of implementing institution or region-wide solutions.  

At the end of the project the partners will have used the JISC pump-priming process to implement change and the seamless environment necessary to support regional ePortfolio progression pathways.  New working practices, procedures and processes will be embedded.  Permanently changed working practice will ensure that long term sustainability is maintained at each partner site.   

Lead institution

• Newcastle University

Project partners

• Newcastle University (Host institution and lead site) Responsible for delivering project – lead site
• City of Sunderland College, Durham University, Northumbria University, Stockton Riverside College, Sunderland University, Teesside University - Collaborating and delivering one or more of the work packages
• Academy subject centre - Quality Assurance on the project & coordinated the writing of the bid; Responsible for project dissemination
• SHELL, Plymouth - The design, development and implementation of the ioNode infrastructure, the open source and open standard technologies which underpin the transfer infrastructure
• Norman, regional network - Advisory board
• JISC Regional Support Centre Northern - ensure that FE colleges can be involved

See the project's final report (December 2006), which includes reporting on the continuation phase.