e-Portfolio

I heard that eLumen 3 has some kind of portfolio built in. I think Brian Donahue-Lynch might have said it. What you're talking about is augmenting the eLumen interface. I think of a mashup as a separate application which combines data sources to produce some desirable output.

So, for example, we could write a php application which reads in the ePortfolio publications of student work(IF it's a standard database system and they give us read access from outside the system), then reads in all the scores, and allows the user to create a link between a score and a piece of work. Sounds wonderful at the outset, but it'd be quite a trick to actually use, since it jumps out of the workflow of the eLumen scoring system and puts you in another application.

Getting back to what i was saying - what you want, i think, needs to be a feature request to eLumen for one of two things:

a) request fields in the rubric which ties the rubric to a selected work in ePortfolio, or
b) request that a hook API be added to eLumen so that hooks could be written which add fields to the view, processes the connection data at the model level, and gathers data from eP at the controller level to get it ready for the view. (this would be ideal)
Phorum (the forum software we're running on this site) makes extensive use of hooks, which can do everything from add new fields to the post form to database maintenance.

I'll see if Ken C. knows anything about the openness of the e-Portfolio database.

James Revillini
eLumen Admin / Research Specialist / Webmaster
Tunxis CC

I think, Steve, that we should start our quest at the eP web site. We need to find out what the software is supposed to be capable of before we reengage CTDLC. For all we know, the issue was dropped because eP just won't talk with anything else, as Ken suggested might be the case. Now the big question: who's going to research it and when?!

NOT IT!

James Revillini
eLumen Admin / Research Specialist / Webmaster
Tunxis CC

I like that simple approach, Jim. At this point I see no real beauty of an eport tie in beyond data sharing one database to the next. The big issue eport and elumen was to eliminate double work. I.e., if a faculty completed an evaluation of student work in eport, it would then match the eval in eLumen, so that Sally wouldn't need to enter scores in more than one environment.

Adding an eportfolio function to eLumen it seems to me would be a kind of "holy grail" for assessment purposes. I have not looked at OSPI lately (in the past year or so) but there is one example of an opensource effort that has potential.

eLumen doesn't (yet) have the eportfolio functions that it might, but 'market pressures' certainly point in this direction. I had mentioned at the NEASC annual conference that I learned a new company had formed called Cengage, formerly known as Prince (no, not really, but formerly known as Thompson Learning), which also then bought out a fairly developed Learning Outcomes Management System called TrueOutcomes, subsequently putting major development resources behind it. This will be fully integrateable with LMS's, and will include a full-blown electronic-portfolio functionality. So we are in the midst of the emergence of some big players.

In all of this, one of the virtues of being where we are with eLumen, is that we are right in the midst of the simultaneous development of the system itself as it addresses our needs, and in the midst of defining its use according to our own expectations of standards, academic self-direction, core values of teaching and learning. Though eLumen itself is not opensource, where we are at in its development and use is much more like an opensource environment than I suspect will be the case when a full, commercial, prepackaged system gets instituted by someone further away from the ground-level implementation.

It is not always pretty (or comfortable) being on the development-edge of this stuff, but at least at this point we have the space and the opportunity to explore possibilities before options might be suddenly narrowed by system choices and decisions.

Brian