California Represented in the PESC Academic ePortfolio Workgroup
John Ittelson, current Director of Communication, Collaboration, and Outreach for the California Virtual Campus (CVC), seems to be everywhere...all the time; especially where electronic portfolios are concerned. As a member of the CVC, he was instrumental in establishing the ePortfolio California project, and its accompanying pilot that included over twenty community colleges, CSUs and UCs. He has supported the wide-spread adoption of ePortfolios for higher education, and his published works include An Overview of Institutional E-Portfolios, an EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, co-authored with George Lorenzo, 2007.
For the past two years, John has served as co-chair of the Academic ePortfolio Workgroup, a standards development initiative currently underway by the Post-secondary Electronic Standards Council (PESC).
PESC is a non-profit, community-based, umbrella association of organizations that share a common interest in the development, implementation, exchange, and promotion of electronic data standards for use in the education community. They have been instrumental in establising data exchange standards for college transcripts, financial aid (IPEDS), and admissions application.
Fresh from the PESC Spring 2011 Data Summit (April 25-28, Boston, MA), I recently caught up with John to discuss his involvement in the PESC Workgroup and how he plans to represent the State of California in this important effort.
Patricia: Who belongs to PESC?
John: PESC is an organization made up of vendors who create tools and resources for, in this case, the Higher Education community, and those people who purchase or consume their products and services, such as institutions and community-based organizations. Federal and state governments are also involved, particularly those groups that have certain data reporting requirements, such as financial aid.
Patricia: How does PESC interact with other organizations and the U S Department of Education?
John: PESC is one of a number of standards development organizations such as IMS, IEEE, or SCORM. At the recent PESC Data Summit the U. S. Department of Education had a number of attendees who encouraged the various organizations to work more closely together to establish standards and interoperability to meet the needs of students and institutions. A number of leaders from the various organizations and U S Department of Education met to move the concept forward.
Patricia: John, tell us a little bit how PESC chooses its initiatives?
John: The PESC Board uses a formal process to determine the areas of need for the various communities that PESC represents. The projects or initiatives that PESC takes on are proposed by one of these stakeholders around a specific need or set of needs. In our case, with ePortfolios, someone from the community came forward and said, “Gee, the use of ePortfolios, is growing or emerging rapidly within the educational community. We propose a standard, or set of standards, for their use so that student data can be shared and made more accessible across all the various stakeholders. A proposal was then drafted and submitted to the PESC organization to begin the formal process of designing a set of standards.
Patricia: So, what is the PESC process for initiating a new standard?
John: Well, once a proposal is submitted, the first thing PESC does is create a workgroup, of stakeholder volunteers, to define the scope of work around the proposed need. Then the workgroup looks for other work, or standards that already exist. I wish I could say it’s a nice neat process, but it does have many twists and turns from this point on. For those of you interested in all the detail, please go to the PESC website.
Patricia: So, how did the Academic ePortfolio Workgroup come about and what was included in the PESC proposal?
John: Through the work with the ePortfolio California Pilot Projects and with discussions with other ePortfolio practitioners a number of challenges about the use of ePortfolios emerged. Of the issues that were identified, one challenge in particular was holding back greater adoption and sharing -- that was the inability to share and access student information. Another question of importance was what happened to the ePortfolio when a student graduated or left to attend a different institution.
Because of the success of the PESC standards developed around the California eTranscript it was felt that California could again provide leadership to develop PESC Standards around ePortfolios. The proposal, as well as all the work done by the workgroup is available on the PESC website for public review.
I have been working with ePortfolios now for several years and I’ve watched them emerge and grow across the higher education community here in California, and especially within the Community College System. I’ve seen them used in a variety of different ways and for a variety of different purposes, and I’ve spoken to various stakeholders about their potential to serve students more efficiently, especially in meeting their educational goals, or unique paths towards a degree. And what became very apparent to me, and to others, were the obvious challenges within the educational system regarding the exchange of student information between institutions, and even within the same institution. If we could address those issues, then the value of ePortfolios would be vastly improved and their uses broadened to really meet the needs of students, faculty and institutions. The need was to make ePortfolios easily transportable and accepted across a broad array of institutions.
One of the challenges to the community is that ePortfolios mean some many things to so many people. We decided one of the ways we could help would be to provide some clarification by referring specifically to an academic ePortfolio that helped meet the needs of students pursuing their educational goals. (Side note: If you read the proposal submitted to PESC, you’ll see that we have also proposed the concept of “folio thinking” to describe the pedagogical process inherent in creating ePortfolios.)
Patricia: As one of the co-chairs of the Academic ePortfolio Workgroup, you also represent California’s needs through the California Virtual Campus. What are some of California’s unique needs that ePortfolios can handle and how can these proposed standards address these needs?
John: From a California standpoint, our team entered the standards development process with two goals or premises in mind. First, by understanding our large and diverse population and the unique needs present across all educational segments, and through the experiences of our ePortfolio California Pilot Project, we already knew that one size wasn’t going to fit all, and that even at the state level we would not be able to solve all the implementation, practical, and professional development issues – and more importantly, technical issues around ePortfolios without some kind of standards. And secondly, as a representative of the California Virtual Campus (CVC), I knew that if ePortfolios were to be adopted and implemented throughout the state, they would have to support our overarching goal to get more students graduating with degrees as quickly and efficiently as possible.
So we started by saying, “What are the some of the problems in California that delay efficient student completion]? Have there been successful attempts to address similar issues? We looked at the articulation process, which is clearly related to the student process, and saw how eTranscript California initiated standards to address the efficient exchange of information that allows students to move from one institution to another and report their learning either officially or unofficially. Officially so they get credit on their transcript, and unofficially so they can get counseling and advising regarding what courses they should take to fulfill their long-term program. Not only was this system up and working, but they already had a great deal of student information in databases, The question for us was: could we build on that effort to make ePortfolios more useful and create academic ePortfolios that are maintained and built upon throughout a students’ lifetime.
By establishing standards that support both students and institutions, we are also making it easier for ePortfolio developers to design stronger ePortfolios with richer data, making it easier for institutions to collaborate with other institutions around more things than just transcripts, including advising and counseling.
If you look at all the different ways a student can use an ePortfolio, from using it as a way to communicate with a teacher, to obtaining program certification, to building an ePortfolio to help in a job search – none of these can happen unless there are some practices that are common across all the institutions.
One of the challenges we have right now – independent of the academic ePortfolios – is that more and more students have broader life experiences than at any other time in history. The basic assumption of how students migrate – or the path that students take to meet their educational goals – has changed, but our educational infrastructure hasn’t. So a lot of what we are trying to do with ePortfolio standards is help bring the educational process up-to-date. Our current process of transcripts, student record keeping, and how students share their knowledge about how they learned something, is based more on the way we did it in the 1900’s than the way we could be doing it, or should be doing it in the 21st century!