Electronic Portfolios Interoperability

As the systems in which students, faculty, and institutions author and use electronic portfolios become enterprise systems and as electronic portfolio authors move between institutions with the expectation that their electronic portfolios will travel with them, interoperability specifcations for ePortfolio systems must be developed in the implemented to maximize the effectiveness of the systems.

How to Participate in Specifications Development
The IMS Global Learning Consortium is an international body that develop advanaced learning technology interoperability specification. IMS has formed a SIG to develop recommendations on how existing standards can be used with ePortoflio systems and to develop a new data format specification to enable electronic portfolios to be portable between systems. You can participate in the development process by send use cases, narratives describing the interaction of people and computers, and other requirements documents to IMS in response to the SIG's ePortfolio Requirements Request. It is available in .doc and .pdf formats. If your institution is or becomes an IMS member, you can participate more directly through weekly ePortfolio SIG conference calls and face-to-face meetings. Contacts Darren Cambridge <dcambridge@aahe.org>, ePortfolio SIG chair, for more information.

Below are some throught about interoperability developed by Darren Cambridge and other participants in the IMS SIG, the ePortConsortium, and participants in the integrating instruction and assessment interest group at the Alt-I-Lab.

Interoperability Requirements
In order to meet user expectations, ePortfolio management systems will almost surely need to interact with numerous diverse systems found at a typical institution of higher education. These may include course management systems, student information systems, authentication and authorization systems, certification systems, and other ePortfolio systems. ePortfolio systems will need to exchange information about learners and other users, data the user has created, relationships between components of a portfolio, and information about the process of creating and using the portfolio.

Important interoperability considerations include: access to information about users across systems, access to data created by users across systems, standardization of data structures describing objects within a portfolio, the structure of ePortfolio components, views of the portfolio, and the whole portfolio, sharing common authentication and authorization services with other systems, mapping data between educational communities, enforcing verifiability, non-revokability, and IP rights across systems, and managing workflow across systems.

Information about users:
ePortfolio systems will need access to learners’ personal information (such as demographics and directory information), transcripts and other official records of educational progress, and group memberships (such as classes and clubs). This information may be stored in student information systems, HR systems, and other enterprise systems, some of which may be external to an institution.

Data created by users:
ePortfolio systems will need to be able utilize content created within other learning systems, such as documents (which may be in a variety of formats), reflections, links, feedback, views of a portfolio, and complete portfolios. It’s important that this information be passed in its entirety and that all significant internal structure be preserved.

Data structures:
In order for data to be meaningfully shared and represented across systems, the systems will need to support common data structures for each type of content listed in the last two sections. Elements of the structure of portfolio itself—whether or not it includes a goals section and what the structure of a goal is defined to be, for example—need to be agreed upon and supported by interoperating systems to make full use of the data being shared.

Authentication and authorization:
There needs to be a consistent strategy for authenticating access to ePortfolios and providing access control between different ePortfolio systems. This enables the verification of a common identity across systems and maintains user-defined access control to portfolios and content within them across systems.

Mapping data:
Different standards for representing learner information and portfolio content are accepted within different educational communities, such as K-12, higher education, further education, and corporate training. It will be important to develop a standard way of mapping one standard to another in order to provide data integrity and usability.

Rights Management:
In some cases, data within a portfolio may need to be verifiable with an external authority, such as professional certification organization, and it may need to be non-revokable by the user. In addition, portfolios may contain intellectual property, which belongs to the user or one or more third parties, the rights to which need to be controlled. Information about these constraints and dependencies should be preserved as data is moved and systems should support the resolution of the constraints in a consistent way.

Workflow:
The processes of creating, editing, sharing, evaluating, and scoring portfolios may be performed using multiple applications and may be specified by the someone other than the learner, such as in the context of a course. There should be a standard way to represent the workflow of these processes and mechanisms for applications to pass both the description of the process and messages about the status of individual portfolios within them.

Resources

IMS Global
Learning Consortium
Use Cases