In his recent article Derek Morrison drew our attention to the Maricopa ePortfolio tool. Here I offer a brief overview of what we've found out so far about this interesting initiative and provide some background which explains why all HEIs in particular, and perhaps educational institutions more generally, should be interested in initiatives of this type. Read on if you want to know more. All UK HEI's are soon to be required by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) to provide students with progress files. The progress files consist of two components; a student transcript, and a Personal Development Plan (PDP). The latter is defined by QAA guidelines as a “structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development”.
Although there is no requirement for institutions to support this through electronic means, many are chosing to go down this route, rather than to adopt the more traditional combination of face-to-face tutor meetings and paper based reflection. Whilst some of these institutions are considering implementing, sometimes complex, solutions provided by commercial vendors, others have developed sometimes equally complex home grown solutions. It may be, however, that the conceptually simple weblog model may have something to offer here, if issues related to user management and privacy could be overcome. With this in mind, the Maricopa ePortfolio tool looks to us to be a really interesting innovation worthy of further exploration.
Whilst the Maricopa ePortfolio tool was developed primarily as an instructional tool, it is based upon a weblog architecture and, with a little modification, could, perhaps, make a major contribution towards PDP requirements. At the moment users of ePortfolio have the ability to make their weblogs private or to open them up to the masses. If it proved possible, however, to extend this functionality to enable users to release their reflections to individual users (such as their tutors), then this tool could appeal to anyone looking to engage their students in an ongoing reflective dialogue. Whilst I appreciate that this proposal may deviate somewhat from Maricopa's original design concept, I do think that the idea may have some merit, and I have have no doubt that many in HE, or indeed education more generally, would find this to be a useful addition to their toolset.
Designed at Chandler-Gilbert Community College by enterprise systems programmer, Audree Thurman, the Maricopa ePortfolio tool is currently used by 200+ students and faculty at the college. I understand from Alan Levine (Maricopa Learning Exchange) that the software is reasonably easy to use and contains a useful option that enables users to export individual portfolios as ZIP files, either for storage or for sharing via another medium (e.g. CD-ROM or placing on another web site as standalone HTML files). According to Alan, additional functionality is being added to ePortfolio all the time. We would all benefit from watching where their developments take them.
