Suggested Activities to do a Template-Based Portfolio Project
- Former user (Deleted)
Software exploration
It may be that the needs of your institution may be similar to the needs of other institutions before you. Get a sense of what others have done with the OSP tools by exploring the openedpractices.org web site. Download the data structures (matrices, wizards, forms and templates) needed to recreate the experience in your Sakai instance.
Project discovery
The project manager, web developer, instructional designer, xml developer, faculty and students meet to discuss the objectives of the project. The end product of this activity should be a clear understanding of the project goals and student activities leading up a student sharing a portfolio with their intended audience.
Portfolio design
The web developer designs and develops through numerous iterations of portfolio mockups and design. The end product of this activity should be a complete web site (XHTML, images, css and javascript files) that represents a completed student portfolio.
User experience/instructional design
The instructional designer envisions the series of activities that a student will go through in order to author, select and organize their content and its relationship to the portfolio design and select and configure the form, wizard, matrix and portfolio template tools in a way that supports that experience, including writing the scaffolding (instructions, rationale and examples) for each step of the process. When needed, forms that will prompt students for and capture specific portfolio information when completed. The end products of this activity will be a clear understanding of the workflow that a student will go through to author their portfolio, including a set of forms, wizards, matrices and portfolio templates.
XML development
The XML developer will support the work of the instructional designer by creating XML schema that will define the forms and XSL file that will take all of the information gathered by the portfolio template and transforming it to the required XHTML output. The end product of this activity is a series of XSD and XSL files.
Faculty/Support staff training
The faculty that will be using the software with their classes will need training to be able to strain students and/or support the software.
It should be noted that there would likely be a fair amount of interaction and iteration between these activities. All that is fine up to actually deploying the portfolio with a real group of students, but take note: once students are actually using the system and authoring and publishing portfolios, few changes are advised or even possible.