Goals, Users, Processes, Activities
Goals
- Expand the practice of eportfolios throughout all four years of our University Studies general education program
- Integrate eportfolio practices with general teaching and learning activities in the context of an enterprise learning management system
- Incorporate eportfolio use into departments and majors across campus
- Faculty use of eportfolios for promotion and tenure, as well as annual review
- Utilize OSP for institutional portfolio and aggregating data across campus
- Utilize OSP to showcase student and faculty work for external audiences
Users
In the 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 academic years, our users of the Open Source Portfolio were all students, faculty, and mentors in University Studies. In the 2006-2007, we will expand that use to at least three departments.
In the 2004-2005 academic year, our users of Sakai were also all students, faculty, and mentors in University Studies. However, during the 2005-2006 academic year, we piloted almost twenty courses in Sakai 2.0 with approximately 500 new users. Depending on the outcome of our Sakai pilot and our evaluation of other learning management systems, by the end of the 2006-2007 academic year, we expect to have transitioned our remaining 22,000 users to Sakai as the sole LMS used at the institution.
Processes
Although other open source and commercial systems for eportfolios were considered here at Portland State, the Open Source Portfolio was the best fit for Portland State, given the availability of a commercial affiliate to host a pilot and thus avoid an institutional commitment of staff and hardware during the initial evaluation period. Our first two pilots were funded by a one-time grant from a student technology fee fund.
Before our first pilot of the OSP, we held meetings with faculty for a year to learn what parts of their web-based portfolio pedagogical process was effective and required for within eportfolio software. Even once we committed to the first pilot of the OSP, the commercial affiliate we choose to assist us (rSmart) engaged our core faculty in discussions about their pedagogy for over two days before customizing the design of the eportfolio we used Spring term 2005. Listening to our faculty and incorporating their requirements was the first and most important step in our successful implementation at Portland State. Our first pilot of OSP was in University Studies (in three of four levels.) Six faculty had almost 300 students in 8 different courses use OSP (and in some cases, Sakai.)
In addition to piloting OSP, the head of our IT department that provides instructional design and administers our course management system attended Community Source Week 2005 to investigate use of Sakai at Portland State. Given Sakai’s maturity demonstrated at Community Source Week, Portland State decided to pilot Sakai as an alternative to our current WebCT system. Without that support for Sakai, plans for widespread use of OSP at Portland State would have been difficult to envision. Having an advanced Java programmer on one of our IT support teams was also a critical factor in adoption of both OSP and Sakai.
Following that first, Spring 2005 pilot, one of our piloting faculty was so impressed with how OSP/Sakai improved her classroom practices and student learning outcomes that she requested to use it again in her two courses during Summer term 2005. Seeking feedback on OSP at every level of our general education program before expanding use of it across campus, planned one additional pilot during the 2005-2006 academic year.
With a successful outcome from Portland State’s OSP and Sakai pilots, OSP will be implemented throughout our University Studies program during the 2006-2007 academic year, reaching at least 14,000 students annually. Full integration into that curriculum should take at least three years. Also during the 2006-2007, we will begin piloting use of the OSP in three to five departments across campus. After developing a model of departmental implementation, we hope to see full departmental integration across our large, urban campus in five years.
One crucial aspect of our process at Portland State has been to seek buy-in at appropriate intervals. We sought faulty support before the initial pilot. We worked with and enhanced the existing open source ecosystem on campus with our IT departments before drawing up large-scale implementation plans. We worked to ensure that OSP use across campus aligned with institutional values and obtained backing from administrators in order to carry out our large-scale implementation plans. Without those crucial people and departments at Portland State championing OSP, our use would not have been as successful and would not have led to the wide implementation we now envision.
Activities
At Portland State, our use of OSP is unique in that it is primarily pedagogical. Although OSP has many innovative uses for student advising, career development, and enhancing lifelong alumni relationships, our plan begins with utilizing OSP’s pedagogical functionalities and widens to its other uses in future phases of our implementation.
At Portland State, we have used OSP in our existing portfolio assignment in our first year University Studies courses. That program has four learning goals:
- Inquiry and Critical Thinking
- Communication
- The Diversity of Human Experience
- Ethics and Social Responsibility
These goals are the rows of our OSP matrix for University Studies. In addition, students progress through four levels of that program:
- Freshman Inquiry
- Sophomore Inquiry
- Junior Cluster
- Senior Capstone
Those levels are the columns of our OSP matrix for University Studies.
Students collect assignments over the course of the term and populate the cells in one column of the matrix with their work (demonstrating progress in each program goal.) They then reflect on their work, how it demonstrates their progress toward the goal, and other questions individually assigned by faculty. Although this reflective practice/assignment is used throughout our University Studies courses, the time needed to teach web-design has prevented us from using web-based portfolios at every level of our program. Reducing the need for deeper technical user training, OSP will enable us to use eportfolios in every University Studies course.
Given our experience in our pilots, using OSP within the collaborative learning environment of Sakai is vital. If students are always in the system, accessing assignments, contributing to the discussion, utilizing resources, etc., then it is natural for them to be saving all their work for that class in their OSP repository/collection. When they populate their matrix, they do so from the richness of their entire academic experience. Thus, they can make real choices about which assignments demonstrate their progress toward a goal within the matrix. Using OSP within Sakai creates an environment in which the portfolio isn’t an added assignment. It’s a reflective process that helps students connect their academic experiences across courses and thus make meaning of their learning.
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