IMS Global Learning Consortium
ePortfolio
The Goal
To standardize on the exchange of digital information (ePortfolios) that contains evidence of learning, education, training, and life experiences resulting in a more effective matching than currently possible with traditional resumes of applicants to the offerings of potential employers, admissions offices, and so forth. The ePortfolio specification is applicable to all systems that desire to store digital portfolios or exchange these portfolios with other systems-such as ePortfolio systems, learning platforms (LMS, CMS, VLE, IMS), learning portals, assessment systems, student systems, talent management systems, data analytics, social web.
Participants
The Current Situation
Over the last year, IMS has gathered information about its members' needs and the state of ePortfolio interoperability in the marketplace. Members, developers, policy makers and educators from several countries have met to discuss possible paths forward. Those most engaged in the process have come to a consensus of proposed new work on the IMS ePortfolio specification that will take two forms: a maintenance release and a mapping between educational and workplace formats.
The IMS ePortfolio specification:
- supports the advancement of lifelong learning important to many government initiatives.
- makes exchanging portfolios from school to work transitions easier.
- allows educators and institutions to better track competencies.
- enhances the learning experience and improves employee development.
- has been profiled for use throughout Dutch education by Kennisnet through the ePortfolio NL project and has been implemented on a number of ePortfolio platforms, such as PebblePad, Sakai/OSP, and Winvision.
The Rationale
The experiences of ePortfolio implementers have pointed to the need for stronger examples of portfolios encoded following the specification, more extensive best practices guidelines, and several minor technical enhancements.
The next phase of IMS ePortfolio will include a maintenance release that would implement these suggestions, drawing primarily on materials already developed by ePortfolio NL and others. There is widespread agreement within the IMS and ePortfolio communities that facilitating the transition between education and the workplace is of utmost importance to the eventual success of ePortfolios in supporting lifelong learning. In the next phase of IMS ePortfolio, IMS is collaborating with HR-XML to create mappings between both the IMS ePortfolio Specification and the several HR-XML specifications that are designed to accommodate similar information to a common semantic representation, using the core components (ISO 15000-5) approach that has proved successful in a range of e-business applications. This will enable easy translation from IMS ePortfolio, which will focus on the needs of education, and HR-XML, which is seeing widespread adoption by business.