Objectives

The objectives of the OSP are a direct response to the needs of the academic community to provide educational tools geared toward supporting both the individual and the institution. While the portfolio is designed for the primary purpose of supporting an individual's work, the framework within which an individual can be supported is suggested and in many cases prescribed by the academic institution.
The objectives below describe what the OSP software hopes to achieve in response to the needs of the academic community.

• Establish an environment that enables an individual to present and reflect upon original, authored work in a manner that facilitates multiple modes of learning, is readily accessed and easy to use
• Provide means for individuals to discover and articulate relationships within and between their works within a collection and to discover patterns within those relationships that help them make sense of the whole.
• Enable owners to control the visual and navigational design of a portfolio of authored work
• Protect the intellectual and personal property rights of individuals who present work through the software
• Provide quality information about learning outcomes and rubrics to individual portfolio owners, course instructors, degree program administrators, and institutional administrators
• Provide access at the institutional, departmental, and course level to assessment data crucial to evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of efforts to promote learning and participation in the credentialing and accreditation processes
• Provide information to learners and teachers seeking to understand the learning process
• Provide a tool for faculty and staff development, as well as the hiring, promotion, and tenure processes
• Offer default components based on best practices for gathering content, managing workflow, and presenting content for a variety of professional uses
• Enable collaboration and exchange of ideas among members of a portfolio community in response to presentation of work
• Provide for seamless lateral movement of content between institutional departments, as a transition between roles within an institution, and in moving between institutions, and in managing relationships with multiple institutions simultaneously
• Provide an environment built in accordance with national and international standards
• Interoperate with human resource, student information, course management, learning management, and other enterprise-wide systems
• Provide an environment for students to display their work to potential employers