UM Priorities for 2.5

GENERAL
At Michigan, we do not have a single vision or use for ePortfolio. We are in a highly interdisciplinary and distributed learning environment - institutionally directed competencies, goals, and/or outcomes are rare (excpet for medical, dental schools). Thus, OSP-related goals, uses and interests are widely varied. For undergraduates, we need an ePortfolio environment that is experience-centric (not course-centric); focus groups with our undergraduates have shown over and over again that students most important learning occurs outside the classroom - in service learning communities, student organizations, professional internships, and so on. Therefore, we need an OSP environment that supports students in 1. identifying their learning goals, 2. identifying and reflecting-on their learning and 3. demonstrating (through the construction of learning artifacts) the value of their learning experiences. Furthermore, we have no institutional mechanisms to inspire, prod, or cajole faculty into using OSP in the classrooms. Therefore, most of our support for ePortfolios comes from the student affairs where there is a push into eventually getting ePortfolio integrated into the fabric of student life.

The ability to create portfolios in "MyWorkspace" - this needs to be part of an overall effort of addressing the challenges of a Sakai environment that is built primarily around course sites, and move instead toward an activity-centric environment where OSP (and GM) can provide direction and support for students to integrate, reflect, and demonstrate their learning across the entirety of their course and co-curriculur learning experiences.

In My Workspace, students need to be able to create public portfolios (these usually include resumes, philosophy statements, and specific text and visual artifacts that showcase their knowledge, skills, and expertise) and be able to have others (i.e. potential employers) be able to easily view and comment on these portfolios through a simple link.

In general, our biggest barrier to use and adoption is too many clicks, a non-intuitive interface, and other factors that hinder the overall user experience Analysis of authoring environment  (completed by Zac Monahan)

"authoring" includes building Data Structures (xsds, forms), Constructing Workflows (matrices, wizards), and Creating Metadata (instructions, directions, scripts, etc.)
With its current descriptive capacity, OSP 2.4 is well suited to transactional forms:Applications, Resume, and Simple Reflections
OSP 2.4 struggles with more complex, multi-part forms - Needs additional documentation tag - titles, headers, and additional labels

Ananlysis of Workfows:

1. Pathway from site entrance to workflow is too bloated: 2 clicks from portfolio entrance to workflow; 2 more clicks to forms

2. Clients requesting direct path from matrix/wizard to form

3. Permissions structure for evaluation/feedback is too rigid: Need flexibility for multiple evaluation forms; Need mechanism for student to add evaluators

General Recommendations 

Create additional documentation tags to provide way to format forms, create structure ¿Eliminate needless clicks to reduce user fatigue
¿Make process more intuitive, less like work
¿Add flexibility to evaluation/feedback cycle
¿Multiple evaluation forms
¿User-defined evaluators
¿Make it as easy as possible for user to access metadata
¿Include critical data (instructions, etc.) inside forms instead of externally  ¿
¿