Linking research & learning technologies through standards

I recently attended the 2010 EIFEL e-portfolio conference called “Learning Forum London 2010“. Naturally, this conference was of particular relevance to the recently completed Digital Education Revolution (DER) e-portfolio activity, but also covered topics including trusted access to personal information and access and identity management. These topics are also of direct relevance to the work of two other recent activities; Century Curriculum Content and Learning Content Discovery and Exchange activities (all of these activities are part of the Technical Standards for Digital Education project).

There were numerous discussions at the conference on how to empower individuals to maintain control over their personal information. A parallel forum focused on the evolution of an “Internet of Subjects” (meaning an internet of/for people, rather than content).

I also presented a paper on privacy and e-portfolios which discussed some recent work in the Australian VET sector on this topic.

There were interesting updates on a number of European projects of relevance to Australian education including TAS3 (Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services) which is developing and testing an architecture and related infrastructure for faciltating trusted communication, access and exchange of information online.

Another project called ASPECT is looking at a number of learning technology standards/specifications. This includes for example evaluating software tool support for specifications such as IMS Common Cartridge and SCORM 2004. The ASPECT project is producing some really useful information about e-learning standards/specifications and has been mentioned on this blog previously.

XCRI (eXchanging Course Related Information) is a UK standard for describing University/college course information using a standardised format. It can be used to help match people to courses courses that meet their requirements (including for example study area, study mode and location), as in this project in the English Midlands.

The conference also confirmed in my mind that the leap2A specification for e-portfolios is fast becoming the de facto standard for e-portfolio interoperability. There seems to be a lot of activity around the specification at the moment and more e-portfolio software tools are starting to support it or consider supporting it.

You can find more information about the Learning Forum London 2010 on the conference website.

The Technical standards for digital education project’s e-portfolio (electronic portfolio) activity is now complete and a final report has been published. There has been a growing interest in Australian schools and beyond in the potential for e-portfolios to support learning and teaching aims. The work of this particular project was defined by these initial aims:

• Develop a clearer understanding of current e-portfolio use in Australian schools
• Identify the key technical challenges for supporting e-portfolios in the Australian schools sector
• Inform future technical support requirements and activities.

The focus group that presided over this activity comprised a number of experienced and enthusiastic people, and also included representatives from tertiary education. The group identified a range of common uses for e-portfolios in Australian schools, including reflection on achievements and planning, supporting transitioning and pathways, and assessment.

The report illustrates this usage with examples of current e-portfolio usage in jurisdictions, including the Smart Classrooms initiative (QLD), the Future SACE (South Australian Certificate of Education) and the Digital portfolio resources developed by the Victorian government. A number of technical challenges were identified based on focus group input. These challenges broadly fell into the following four categories:

• Usage: how e-portfolios are used (their purpose), and how this usage can change over time
• Portability: enabling e-portfolios to follow learners through learning pathways and transition points
• Longevity: ensuring the e-portfolio and associated content has longevity
• Access: controlling and managing appropriate access to learner information.

The report makes recommendations for further action based around these key technical challenges, including the need for national collaboration to identify solutions. Thanks to all the focus group members for the time and expertise they contributed to this work.

When putting together the recently released VET e-Portfolio roadmap [PDF], we used the e-Framework as a methodology to describe what types of services/functionality an e-Portfolio system may contain. During the (very long) drafting stage, we presented this view of an e-Portfolio system to a range of different audiences and interested parties in Australia, New Zealand, USA and Europe.

Needless to say it changed a lot during that time, and we went through countless refinements. The standard terminology used in the e-Framework diagram also got pared back a bit. The audience for the e-Portfolio roadmap is not necessarily technical, and we found some people had a bit of difficulty understanding terms like “service genre”. As such we ended up with the following diagram in the roadmap document:

e-portfolio system diagram

The shaded services (authenticate, authorise, annotate and validate) are services that we identified as requiring national collaborative action.

The original draft VET e-Portfolio Service Usage Model (SUM) is still on the e-Framework community wiki. I found it  interesting to look back and see how our thinking has evolved. Originally we divided the business processes into three groups; collect, manage, present. After a lot of discussion and feedback, this grew to 4; source/identify, manage, communicate and present. This is not necessarily so different from other models, however we wanted to show that a learner could identify and use content it without needing to store it in their e-Portfolio. The addition of communicate was an attempt to reflect the often collaborative nature of e-Portfolio creation and use.

Our task now is to finalise the VET e-Portfolio Service Usage Model based on our growing experience.