[DG: Teaching & Learning] Learning Activities and Portfolios: time for a talk?

[kamann at stanford.edu]

Hello all,
I came to a realization this morning after talking with Clay. For the Learning Activities project, I have been talking about breaking the functionality that had been siloed in T&Q, Assignments, and Gradebook and Schedule. However, despite this, I was still thinking of Portfolios as a separate thing from the learning activities work we were doing. It's probably not as separate as I had been thinking.

Early on we talked to Janice Smith to get an overview of portfolios and Sakai. We talked to Virginia Tech about their work with portfolios and they later contributed some interviews. However, VT was the only school that explicitly used portfolios and the interviews they had at the time were only with students and TAs. Because none of the instructors we interviewed formally talked about writing out objectives and tying this to learning activities , none of the 8 instructor persona talk about things like writing objectives or attaching these to their activities, or evaluating student work based on such objectives.

This morning I read a note I had from a talk with Amber, Teggin, and Sam at Virginia Tech. They said that in one sense Assignments and Portfolios are alike in that students upload files to both, but Assignments is all about the submission, while Portfolio is more about the process.

Clay has reminded us that the needs that have been captured in Portfolios could, in the future, be met from different contexts, since tool boundaries will not be the same in 3.0. While it may be that the goals of a person interested in capturing evidence that a student has met certain objectives is different than one who just wants to give them an 87%, it's likely that they share some common needs that only fork off at a certain point. This is why embodying clusters of needs as persona has been useful for our project: it's a tool for helping us to see when Jane and Lisa have the same basic common needs, only Lisa needs a little more, or when Mark needs a completely different interface from Tammi.

While there is a part of me that wants to narrow focus, I know that we'd likely miss a great opportunity if we did. If we design interface for describing a learning activity, there are likely hooks into learning objectives that we need to plan for. Would an interface for grading a student submission be the same as that used for one evaluating it as part of a student's portfolio, or would it be radically different? 

I think that there are three ways we can start to build this understanding.

1) touch base with the folks who are thinking about OSP for 3.0 (Noah, Beth)
2) review the learning capabilities work that the T&L community is doing
3) find out about VT's latest interviews since January

After this, we may either need to add a persona, or it's possible that some of the existing persona might think more about objectives.

What do people think?
Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing Services,