JISC

This project has now completed. See the project website and the final report

ePortfolios have rapidly occupied the foreground of innovative approaches to learning, assessment and personal development: though all conceptions of eportfolios are far from innovative. 

ePortfolios differ from other elearning systems, such as VLEs, in that they are more concerned with the personal experience of learning than with an institutional concern for content delivery, subscription to services and tracking use. Within the eportfolio, and wider, development community discussions of ‘learner data’ tend to conflate institutional data and eportfolio data as an amorphous whole.  These data types should be considered separately and treated separately, whilst recognising that they need to work in harmony to support claims of learning; of progression; of professional competence and of aptitude for new roles.

Linking the institutional data domain with the personal data domain remains challenging; an issue made more difficult by protective data gatekeepers.  Until data management issues mature middleware services like SWEET.net provide an opportunity for learners to access institutionally held (and approved) data to their personal learning systems for onward use in online CVs; applicational presentations; and career portfolios.  Notwithstanding obvious, and longer term, concerns for the meaningful authentication of qualifications, certificates, licences and transcripts; an immediate case for data sharing is the avoidance of unnecessary repeated data entry by the user e.g. name; address; contact details and courses studied.

In short, the implementation of SWEET.net in the space between the institutional MIS and the personal eportfolio presents an opportunity to gain efficiencies for both the learner and the teacher easing their association with both and reducing potential barriers and objections to wider adoption of eportfolio systems.

Aims and Objectives  

The project will develop mechanisms to transfer student related information from the SITS student management system via Sweet.Net to the PebblePad ePortfolio system. This information will then be available to users to organise groups and display personal information for use in the  job/further study application process.

The core of the project is to implement a service using Sweet.Net which takes data from the SITS student management system and makes it available via a web service to the PebblePad ePortfolio system. 

The specific objectives are to:

• help prove the robustness of the original Sweet.Net SDK
• prove its portability and re-usability by others
• provide an authentic test bed for further development during the lifespan of the project

Project Methodology 

We will adopt a test-driven approach with broad stakeholder involvement to deliver a robust implementation project. 

We will implement the toolkit in the primary host institution (University of Wolverhampton) to test the toolkit’s extant reusability.  We will then develop the toolkit to improve its portability and further evaluate it in a second host institution (QMUC).

Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders 

The outcomes of the project have wide applicability with learners and teachers benefiting from improved usability and flexibility within the ePortfolio system. As the tools will deliver institutional information into the students ePortfolio a higher level of validity of evidence will be achieved. For staff the availability of groups generated within backend systems will greatly simplify organisation and communication with students from within the ePortfolio.

The development will also deliver a reusable facility which can be adapted for use with different ePortfolio or student management systems.

Project Partners 
Queen Margaret University College 
Pebble Learning
Maven Associates 

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