My older son set up all my content–ripped my CDs, set up my playlists, and got everything uploaded to the right place. Then he ripped several movies for me (Mulan, You’ve Got Mail, and The Music Man).

It turns out that this ipod has been a true blessing to me as I go through chemotherapy. It is so small and lightweight that I can just slip it in my purse. The movies are wonderful, because they distract me from the long hours of waiting. I can muffle the noise from other patients and their visitors with the ear buds.

So between the ipod, photo/video capable cell phone, and text messaging, I have a whole communication network right there in the chair. How cool is that?

Certainly there are three fairly standard types of portfolios: Developmental, Assessment, and Presentation/Showcase. When I am engaged in conversations about portfolios with colleagues, I often hear that the “goal” of portfolio use revolves around generating assessment data, both at the course level and at the program level. Interestingly enough, when the same people start describing what a portfolio should look like, the description references showcase/presentation portfolios. Maybe people get caught up in the presentation of the portfolio artifacts without sufficient attention to the structure, purpose, or type of data that will be collected.

I think it unlikely that you could ever force a successful hybrid portfolio design, for example, between a presentation portfolio (highly student driven, light on reflection, light on structure, and capturing the “end zone” of the student educational experience) and an developmental portfolio (highly institutionally driven, reduced flexibility with respect to student selected artifacts, heavy on reflection, encompassing a longer period of time).

I have concluded that two important boundaries–allowable complexity and maximum resource commitment–must be determined fairly early in the process. A simple process is more likely to be adopted and used. A complex process has to overcome its own inertia as well as generating additional resource requirements (primarily in training/effort costs). Complexity can be measured with a number of indicators. These seem most obvious:

A second perspective is resource commitment. Portfolios with more artifacts, more evaluations, over a longer period of time are (of necessity) more resource intensive than those that focus on artifacts collected over a short period of time and covering a narrow range of skills.

Reporting mechanisms and number of evaluator interactions, in my experience, can be make-or-break items. If you have more than 10 portfolios to evaluate, you have to start thinking about the amount of time it takes to actually generate any useful and meaningful data. If the ratings and results must be entered and tabulated manually (worst-case on paper, slightly-but-not-much-better-case in a spreadsheet file) the amount of time required for collection and data entry becomes prohibitive. In addition, options for using the data in any other context or sharing it with any other office or program are much reduced.

So this leaves me thinking several things.

1) I have been confusing assessment systems with portfolios. (see Trey Batson and The E-Portfolio Hijacked.) We might be far better off investigating how to use outcomes in whichever Learning Management System is used on campus or creating/purchasing a web-based data collection tool to collect and aggregate performance information. This has the advantage of narrowing the focus and decreasing the effort required to generate, collect, and aggregate useful and meaningful data.

2) Personal Learning Environments, where students create a dynamic personal record of their journey toward enlightenment might be a better solution. Graham Attwell writes about this fairly often. In particular, I enjoyed this presentation on slideshare. But I cannot honestly say that I think most students will embrace this concept and become motivated enough (or technologically skilled enough) to create such a system/record of knowledge.  Nor do I think most faculty at my institution will be able to help them do this.

3) Traditional portfolios are meant to encourage students to think critically about who they are, what they’ve learned, and how they have changed as a result. It seems to me that a showcase/presentation type portfolio can do this fairly well. University students generally create these types of portfolios as they approach matriculation. Maybe my colleagues and I have a bias toward this type of portfolio because it represents an opportunity to get students to impose some coherence on what may be a fragmented curriculum, transferred credits collected from a number of institutions, taught by faculty members who never draw explicit connections to courses taken before or after. (see the Greater Expectations Report for a thorough discussion of the challenges facing Higher Education in the United States.)

4) Finally, I have to confess that I have long been content with a superficial approach to portfolios, and even being distracted by an assessment system masquerading as a portfolio. I am a fraud! I admit it.

Fortunately, I can change.

image by LadyHawke365

I was delighted when I found that there really was a script that allows you to use a csv file to create a set of courses on Moodle. This is something that I think should be part of the moodle core. Fortunately, a solution exists–contributed and tweaked by several kind souls in the forums at moodle.org. While additional batch tools maybe available in later moodle versions, 1.8.x does not include them. The solution I present here is good for moodle 1.8.x (I have done it on 1.8.1 and 1.8.4 WIMP and LAMP).

When setting up our pilot portfolio instance, I needed to be able to create some 36 student portfolios. Getting the process down now will ensure that additional portfolios can be created quickly each semester.

First you have to have the users all in the system. I created a “sandbox” course and ran uploadusers with a csv file to create the accounts and enroll all the students students into the sandbox course. This course can be deleted or hidden, as desired. In fact, you don’t have to enroll them into a course at all–that field is optional. I was going to use it as a means of sending a bulk email to portfolio users.

Where did the information come from? I actually exported gradebook information from the appropriate courses on the main Moodle LMS for the university and dropped it into the proper columns in an excel spreadsheet. After that, I filled in the remaining fields and saved the file in csv format. (If you use excel, always check the end of the file in wordpad. It is very easy to get extra rows of empty fields if you are not careful.)

Second, you need to install uploadcourse.php (this version of the file contributed by M. Pearson at Earlham–rename it to take off the txt extension if you use it) to your moodle/admin directory.

Create a csv file with the required information to create the courses. My file looks something like this. The file is a bit tricky to make. Almost all of the fields are required to create courses, even some things you might rather skip over! Fortunately, the script is friendly and will stop immediately when it encounters a required field with no data. Do double check the maxbytes settings in the moodle system policies or calculate the correct values. This value is in bytes, not mb.

If successful, the courses will be created and each student will be assigned as the instructor for that course. For more information about the various settings and fields, please see http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=30126#p339447

You can create categories with this script, but the categories are only created if at least one course exists in them. If you need to create an “empty” category, then you will want to create a placeholder course with a placeholder instructor account. I created a user called “tba” and placeholder courses which were deleted later.

The categories are created in the order of the csv file, which can be a plus if you would like to manipulate those. But if you make a mistake the category order is tedious to change afterwards.

You trigger this script manually. I haven’t figured out how to add it to the admin menu.

This process worked very well to create portfolio courses for our portfolio instance. Although it takes a couple of steps, that is much faster than creating 20 or 30 courses individually and then having to set up the course setting information and assign the instructor role.

In addition to every student having access to all the course resources (and the ability to add more for class use at any time), each student had his or her own topic.� This is where they actually built a sequence of activities to teach a topic with electronic tools.� They created labels, an assignment, a quiz, a forum with an appropriate prompt, a lesson, and posted links to readings (files and websites).

This was not at all a portfolio, although elements of it might be appropriate in a portfolio.� It was really a workspace for students learning something about how to use technology effectively in a classroom.

I would like to start creating workspaces for students.� I am not sure if it would be better to do it in Moodle, or if it would be better to use something like the google suite of tools.� I have not mastered the enterprise tools for creating courses and assigning “teachers” in bulk.� This kind of situation could require a large number of courses each semester, depending on how many instructors wanted to experiment with it.� The moodle hub would be very good for this, as students could pass through from one instance to another fairly transparently.� Large scale deployment could be a challenge! (categories, unique shortnames, space. . .)

Something to think more about.

Related links:

http://moodlea.blogspot.com/2007/05/students-setting-up-moodle-for-their.html�

]]>