Today the IT department piloted a new open source eportfolio system in one of my capstone classes. The team from LaGuardia’s Center for Teaching and Learning, who are main champions of the LaGuardia ePortfolio Initiative, were eager to test out the system in front of some real students. The proposed new system may someday replace the existing ePortfolio system in use today at LaGuardia. However prior to a switch being made, a new system will need to be throughly tested before it can be deployed in a production environment that must support up to 11,000 users. Since I had done much of the preliminary work in reviewing and selecting LaGuardia’s current eportfolio system, I was asked to review the new system which is being considered.
The existing LaGuardia ePortfolio system is a solid application that can enable novice web users to easily create basic, and not so basic, electronic portfolios. LaGuardia has been using the Concord (http://www.concord-usa.com) Masterfile and Scioware Portfolio Presentation Manager to support the eportfolio initiative for a few years and the system has performed well. However the recent rise of in the number of powerful and free open source solutions has made it worth our while to investigate other alternatives.
The new system under consideration is customized version of the Sakai Portfolio system (http://www.sakaiproject.org) that is in use at many educational institutions. The new system has a few rough edges in the areas of the user interface, however this is precisely why the IT team wanted to test the system with actual user. The user testing we did today should help the designers improve the overall workflow. I can’t wait to see how it will look after they make some of the changes we suggested.
Stay Tuned!!
