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

Fri Mar 19 11:35:11 PDT 2010

On the one hand, I think supporting these sorts of rich uses is important. On the other hand, too heavy an emphasis on these use cases is exactly what has killed many an ePortfolio initiative (both development and adoption). In my opinion, competency/learning objective assignment should be a pluggable service. Schools that need only a simple version should get the simple version. Schools that want something richer (and therefore more complex), should be able to have that too. But let's not design our entire ePortfolio vision around the most elaborate and difficult to implement scenarios that often require unrealistically large changes in the academic culture of a school.

Given the high number of abject failures and relative dearth of smashing successes in the ePortfolio space, I think it is critical that we stick to articulating first principles and identifying fundamental building blocks that could be scaled to a rich and complex evaluation environment but don't assume or require it.

- m 

 Oracle Email Signature Logo
Michael Feldstein | Principal Product Manager| 818-817-2925
Oracle Higher Education Product Development
25 Christian Hill Road | Great Barrington, MA 01230

-----Original Message-----
From: Jacques Raynauld [mailto:jacques.raynauld at hec.ca] 
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2010 2:22 PM
To: pedagogy at collab.sakaiproject.org; sakai-ux at collab.sakaiproject.org; portfolio at collab.sakaiproject.org
Subject: Re: [DG: User Experience] [DG: Teaching & Learning] Teaching & Learning] Learning Activities and Portfolios: time for a talk?

To all of you that have contributed to the interesting discussion on Learning Activities and Portfolios: time for a talk?

1.  I certainly approuve of the idea of  integrating more closely the 
LMS and Portfolios systems.   At the Université de Montréal and also 
some  European universities (Lausanne), we see new specialized master programs being redesigned from the start  using a completely integrated Module/Portfolio approach with a strong program competency/learning outcomes flavour.  A typical module would include learning outcomes, learning activites (readings, exercices, etc.) and broad type assignments with reflexive components normally found in portfolios (matrix views are also planned).  This is not the future, it is being designed right now with few tools available to support these approaches.

2.  People have mentioned some tools (goal management) that could be used to link assigments or activities to learning outcomes/competencies.  It is a good  start but we need to approach this problem in a much more comprehensive manner.  In some work we are currently doing for École Polytechnique in Montreal in the context of the CDIO Syllabus (a detailed competency-based description for engineering), we face the following challenge. For some courses, the broad learning outcomes/competencies (say level 1 granularity) are going to be set by the instructor or most likely by the university at the course level.  Based on a list of pre-assigned  learning outcomes/competencies, instructors could set finer grain learning outcomes/competencies (say level 1.1 or 1.1.1) which are are pedagogically more relevant for the activities or assignments undertaken.  This is the top-dowm approach.  Another possibility is the bottom-up approach :  competencies/learning outcomes could be set at the activities/assignments level and then added up automatically at the course level.

3. This kind of more complex learning outcomes/competencies integration might not be usual now but it very likely to sprawl in the near future.  
The CDIO initiative for engineering (http://www.cdio.org/), the European qualification framework - Bologna (http://ec.europa.eu/education/lifelong-learning-policy/doc44_en.htm),
some U.S. initiatives including the Lumina Foundation project in Indiana  and some others states (http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Tuning-American-Higher-Ed/6774/), all point to some expanded functionalities that should be part of Sakai 3, most likely in a structured-page environment.

This is a very interesting challenge for the community.

Jacques Raynauld
HEC Montréal
Open Syllabus team

Yes, it is great to see this conversation develop and to see the direction it is taking. An LMS that allows for the types of functions that have traditionally been associated only with portfolios would be a wonderful development for us and probably a lot of other institutions because it would bring in best practices like learning objectives tied to assessment through rubrics or other methods and make them more common and central to teaching and learning. Learning activities like reflection and storage, selection and presentation of student work could be a more integral part of the learning experience for more students. Instead of having two separate systems (LMS & portfolio) to work through, both students and faculty would simply learn and use one unified robust and flexible system. 

The institution would also benefit by only having one system to fund and maintain plus the system would offer the ability for the institution to gather institutional level reporting data for accreditation and other administrative assessment needs. That may be a lot to expect at this point, but it can be a goal we work toward if we think it is a worthwhile idea.

-Salwa

Salwa Khan
sk16 at txstate.edu
Coordinator, IT Projects
Instructional Technologies Support
Texas State University
512 245-4390

______________________________________
From: pedagogy-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [pedagogy-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Zaldivar, Marc [mzaldiva at vt.edu]
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2010 8:05 AM
To: pedagogy Learning; sakai-ux; portfolio
Subject: Re: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] Learning Activities and Portfolios: time for a talk?

Keli, et al,

This is a wonderful conversation, and I'm glad to see it shaping up in such concrete detail.

On 3/18/10 7:11 PM, "Keli Sato Amann" <kamann at stanford.edu> wrote:

The concern that prompted me to write was another situation: when program objectives have been mapped down to a course, when those objectives are actually attached to particular activities, and when an activity is graded according to those objectives. In this case, students don't have a choice of what maps to each aptitude--it's been specified for them. The work to be featured would be chosen by the instructor or department. An example might be a department that needs to prove that at least 90% of their students meet certain criteria by the end of the year-they use the results of certain assignments or tests in particular classes to demonstrate this.

Is this situation actually within the portfolio domain? Do those who build portfolios need objectives mapped so discretely and for this reason or is this a separate area of concern? Lynn said that stating objectives for activities is a desirable thing, but that might just be because it's always good for students to know why you are asking them to do something and because it's always good to state objectives for any project so you can measure their later success.

I thought this point and question you made, Keli, was one I could comment on.  I do absolutely believe the functionality underlying the departmental/institutional-assessment type of portfolio is within the portfolio domain.  The outputs are quite different, but the source material underneath of it is the same.  A student would want to see various representations of her own work, created for different audiences (public and private).  Departmental administrators would like to see larger collections, but often of very similar material for assessment, but in more summary-based form rather than individual webpages.  Teachng faculty, I find, are right between: they often want to be able to access summary-type information for purposes of grading and evaluation, but they enjoy the individual view of a student's webpage portfolio when thinking about feedback on materials.   For me, it all fits in at different levels of the same process of collect, select, reflect, connect... The stude
 nt-level portfolios we've been discussing so far are often "guided" at some level by the curriculum that the student is a part of.  For some programs, that guidance is heavy-handed; for others, it's much broader.  In either case, we've been encouraging programs to consider three types of portfolios before deciding which arrangement of tools/materials/outputs are best for them (without detail, we use something like the terms "assessment portfolio," "learning portfolio" and "professional development portfolio" as we discuss the arrangement of tools and outputs with programs; most programs end up with a blend of goals from these three).  These determine whether we feature a matrix, a presentation template, develop reflection prompts or evaluation/feedback forms, and all sorts of other factors of portfolio deployment.

I guess my point to this is that as we move forward with the notion that portfolio-like activity is connected to a lot of other activity in the system, then what we are thinking of is making sure that the options for goal management, assignment and reflection upon assignment, and sharing materials with various audiences (in various presentation modes) are central to Sakai 3.  Those are at the heart of all of our portfolio activity, regardless of which tools we deploy.  That's why tools like a blog and even tests and quizzes should potentially be available as part of a group or individual's portfolio: if we focus on the collection, selection, and connection of student and instructor data, then we're doing portfolio, IMHO.

I ultimately agree with your assertion that it's good to encourage the best practice in the way the tools are put together.  Just by having an optional place to connect an assignment to an institutional or departmental goal would encourage many to explore the advantages of this for themselves and for the students, for example.  We have a lot of institutional effort being put into pedagogical training of all of our faculty, so it would certainly help many of our groups support the grassroots effort to improve assessment, student learning, and fruitful technology adoption.

Marc

--
Marc Zaldivar, Ph.D.                                                                 2210A Torgersen Hall
Director, Virginia Tech Electronic Portfolio Initiatives        Blacksburg, VA 24061-0292
Learning Technologies                                                             540.231.8994
Virginia Tech                                                                              marcz at vt.edu

_______________________________________________
pedagogy mailing list
pedagogy at collab.sakaiproject.org
http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/pedagogy

TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send email to pedagogy-unsubscribe at collab.sakaiproject.org with a subject of "unsubscribe"
_______________________________________________
pedagogy mailing list
pedagogy at collab.sakaiproject.org
http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/pedagogy

TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send email to pedagogy-unsubscribe at collab.sakaiproject.org with a subject of "unsubscribe"

_______________________________________________
sakai-ux mailing list
sakai-ux at collab.sakaiproject.org
http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/sakai-ux

TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send email to sakai-ux-unsubscribe at collab.sakaiproject.org with a subject of "unsubscribe"