Background information

MATI Montréal is a T&L research/transfer center set up by the University of Montréal, HEC Montréal (Business School) and École polytechnique (Engineering School).  In 2009, MATI Montreal has lunched a strategic initiative on portfolios.  We currently have numerous portfolio projects including :

1. Program based portfolios (Faculty of education - Business School, Engineering School)
2. Communication workshop (Engineering School)
3. Learning portfolios : Master in pedagogy applied to health sciences (School of Medecine)
4. Electronic Curriculum Vitae or CV (Business School)
5. StudioBook (School of Architecture Workshop).

Related work : Open Syllabus

MATI Montréal is very much interested by the work done at HEC Montréal on Open Syllabus. OSyl organizes all the resources (files, citations, assignments, etc.) and activities (quiz, forum, etc.) through a simple to use and parametrizable template. Osyl  is based on XML so all the information is kept in a structured way. OSyl can push any pedagogical information (description, learning goals, assessment, etc.) present in a syllabus to administrative systems for data mining, reporting or auditing purposes.  See a demo at http://vimeo.com/12495226.  We believe the OpenSyllabus engine can be extended quite easily to apply to portfolios.

Portfolio Project

1. For the moment, the University of Montreal Campus is mainly interested by structured or guided portfolios. The model-based approach developed for the syllabi could be extended for portfolios (se Raynauld and Gerbe, An Open Syllabus Model, Ed-Media, 2009).
2. To implement its portfolio projects, MATI Montréal has extended the Open Syllabus engine to make it more general and more flexible. The new tool was also rewritten to include GWT 2.0 upgrades, REST calls with Sling backend and Open Social gadget support.
3. To initiate useful discussions with the participating schools, we have developed a mock-up tool that can be used i. to create quicky a portfolio with the different resources to be included (txt, files, comments, forms, learning outcomes); ii. the mock-up tool can be used in small pilots with real users (students, tutors), iii. the mock-up tool can also generate the XML representation of the resulting model; iv. the XML can then be inputted in the GWT engine to access additional functionnalities.  The mock-up is simple (it is not a full fledged application) but quite effective in building quickly a real working portfolio.

• • Guided portfolios - Part 1 :  Overview of the tools and models (13 minutes video)
  • Guided portfolios - Part 2 :  Mock-up tool demo (17 minutes video)
  • Guided portfolios - Part 3 :  How to pilot the mock-up with students and tutors (14 minutes)
  • Guided portfolios - Part 4 :  Demo of the proof of concept (14 minutes)
  • Guided portfolios -  Power Point file.
    

A preliminary version the mock-up is available at http://www.matimtl.ca/sitesMATI/GenMaquette_08_En/jsp/list.jsp.  To build your own portfolio, you have to create an account with role=designer.  The mock-up only supports Firefox.

We are currently creating with the mock-up a number of diffferent portfolios for the engineering school, the School of Architecture and the Business School (see the French version http://www.matimtl.ca/sitesMATI/GenMaquette_09_fr/jsp/list.jsphttp://www.matimtl.ca/sitesMATI/GenMaquette_04_fr/jsp/list.jsp

For further information, contact jacques.raynauld@hec.ca.

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