Evaluating e-Portfolio Solutions
The article (Daim et al., 2016) developed and presented a model to evaluate e-portfolio solution which students could showcase their academic works to future schools for higher education or employers for job application.
Their proposed model included four key criteria which were service delivery, cost, functional, and technical. First, the service delivery was concerned about attributions of the service itself and abilities of service provider in assisting users. In specific, the model assessed how the service provider was accountable for service quality, responded to technical support requests, managed product updates and changes, and developed user community. In addition, the model examined how the service backed up and recovered when outages or failures happened and also considered customer review of the service and the service provider.
Second, in terms of cost, the model looked at initial or the buy-in cost, maintenance cost, internal support cost, licensing cost, training cost, and professional development cost.
Functional, the third criterion in the model described major features and functionalities of the product, the intended use, and the degree of compatibility when integrating the product to existing learning systems. Among various product features, the authors were especially interested in privacy aspect (e.g. students can control the level of access for each item in their portfolio), customization and personalization capabilities, social media integration, automated workflow capability, assessment and reporting, accessibility, and pedagogical utility (e.g. the elements of the e-portfolio platform should enhance rather than hinder learning).
The final criterion discussed technical requirements for the product. These requirements consisted of identity data and access management, system and application administration management, security, integration capabilities, and interoperability (e.g. the product should support a wide range of user devices).
When the model went through the review process by the appropriate experts, each criterion was rated based on its level of importance and influence. Accordingly, the functional was rated the most important, the technical and the service delivery came in the second, and the cost was rated the least.
In the article, besides proposing the model, the author also used it to evaluate three different e-portfolio platforms including D2L ePortfolio, Digication, and Tk20 in the case study of Portland State University. Interestingly, their findings indicated that D2L ePortfolio was rated the highest using the model, followed by Digication and Tk20. Therefore, the authors recommended D2L ePortfolio as the most optimal solution for the Portland State University.
I think this model is extremely helpful as it provides a framework which helps educational institutions save tremendous amount of time and effort in evaluating and choosing e-portfolio solution for their schools. After reading this article, as I recall that St. Cloud State University is using Tk20 for e-portfolio, I am wondering how the university has evaluated e-portfolio platforms and which factors have been considered when the school chose Tk20. Undoubtedly, each university might have its own priority and perspective on technology acquisition, so I think it would be very interesting to learn more about the correlation between these factors and the decision of adopting technology.
In the process of developing model, the authors simply mentioned that four criteria of the model was suggested based on the requirements of the university committee working on the project. Consequently, I am wondering if other universities have different requirements, how these requirement could affect the model and what the universities could do to adjust the model to fit their needs.
Reference:
Daim, T.U., Boss, V., Thomas, J., Kessler, L., Finn, D., & Krueger, J. (2016). Evaluating technologies for education: Case of ePortfolio. Technology, Innovation and Education, 2(1). Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186%2Fs40660-016-0010-8
