During the spring and summer of 2009, I served as a consultant to the LaGuardia Community College Center for Teaching and Learning in the area of ePortfolio Systems selection. I assisted the members of LaGuardia’s Center for Teaching and Learning and IT department in choosing the new ePortfolio platform to accommodate growth and to replace the aging Concord system that I helped to select years ago when I served as LaGuardia’s first Director of ePortfolio. I was asked by Dean Bret Eynon to review the leading commercial and open source systems and help select three platforms to evaluate for final consideration. Because ePortfolio is a critical component in many of LaGuardia’s strategic goals, not the least of which is Institutional Assessment, helping to choose the correct platform was of vital importance to the college. Due to my extensive knowledge of technology, and my experience in selecting and negotiating the contract for the first system nearly seven years ago, I was asked to work with the current Director, Mercedes Del Rosario, and her staff to assist where needed. I provided the following assistance during this project:
- Helped to select which systems we should investigate
- Selected the hosting company to host the open source solutions
- Evaluated all of the proprietary and open source solutions
- Provided recommendations on software and hardware for the project
- Served as a technical resource on all issues related to hosting, networking, programming, and coordinating a project of this magnitude
In the final analysis, LaGuardia decided upon the system from Digication as a the new platform to support the ongoing eportfolio objectives of the college.