An Open-Source E-Portfolio Platform for Faculty Review (166247952)

7/29/2019 An Open-Source E-Portfolio Platform for Faculty Review (166247952)

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An Open Source e-Portfolio

Platform for Faculty Review

February 13, 2013

Dr. Mary Litch, Director

Academic Technology and Digital Media

Chapman University

Orange, California



The Backstory

Tenure-track faculty required to submit portfoliofor review in years 2, 4 and 6*

Until 5 years ago, paper dossiers only

Experimented with proprietary, cloud-hosted

portfolio software

Experimented with allowing faculty to choose

their own platform

Settled on locally-hosted WordPress multisiteand cloud-hosted video -- Year 3 on WP

All TT faculty hired after 2008 must use



The Constituents

Faculty Candidates

Evaluators

Faculty Affairs

Legal Affairs

System Administrator



Constituents: Faculty Candidates

Range of comfort levels with technology mustbe accommodated

Editing interface can’t look “scary” yet must

allow flexibility of expression to accommodatewide range of disciplines

Text in various file formats plus range of

media types must be accommodated

Reviewed e-portfolio must be private, yet

offer easy (optional) copying to public space



Constituents: Evaluators

Navigation in e-portfolios must mirror tab

structure required in older paper portfolios

E-Portfolios must be viewable at home

Viewing content must be easy and must work

across all OS/browser combos (IE 4, anyone?)

Evaluation history must auto-populate

appropriate pages (by committee and year)

Note: because Legal requires ink signatures onpaper, we no longer allow evaluators to upload

letters themselves



Constituents: Faculty Affairs

Responsible for walking e-portfolio through

evaluation process, uploading evaluator letters,

and archiving

Not IT people; interface can’t be too scary;

technology should help decrease errors

Must be able to assign (evaluator) permissions

by committee membership en masse

Must be able to set begin- and end-times for access to implement committee viewing period

(all in one sitting)



Constituents: Legal Affairs

Litigation surrounding tenure process occurs

frequently Platform must be robust and secure

Individual faculty e-portfolios must be private

Log of viewings by evaluators must bepossible

Archiving of portfolio as submitted must be

possible Archive must be viewable for the “litigation

lifespan” -- potentially several decades



Constituents: System Administrator

Limited IT support for project, so platformmust be plug-and-play and very stable

Video storage and transcoding must be

easily off-loaded to cloud, with seamlessintegration with base platform

Customizations must be straightforward

Large developer community is stronglydesired



The Platform

Locally-hosted WordPress 3.* multisite Video is cloud-hosted with Bits on the Run,

which offers seamless integration with WP

Customized roles with distinct permissions:candidate, evaluator, FA (Faculty Affairs)

Customized theme with locked pages and

navigational structure Full WP Dashboard hidden from non-admin

users (both individual sites and site-wide)



The Future

Looking for other universities to partner withto continue customization (themes and

plugins) and testing

Eventual goal: migrate large number of distinct WP plugins

into single plugin and range of custom

themes

create user documentation and support forum

make “complete package” available to other

universities for local implementation



The Front End (Evaluators)

http://portfoliosdev.chapman.edu/janesmith

Username: guest Password: l0gin





Page Editing and “Dashboard” (Candidates)


Username: candidate1 Password: chapmant3st



Documents

An Open-Source E-Portfolio Platform for Faculty Review (166247952)