cogdogblog: WebCT Opens Doors to OPSI e-portfolio

November 09, 2003

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WebCT Opens Doors to OPSI e-portfolio

It was bound to happen, once the interest in electronic portfolios has bubbled widely, the big Course Management Monoliths would bring them in under their hoods.

I am not at EDCUASE (hardly seems to be any blogging from there? trying a feedster search now- hey who put all those banner ads in there?), and this is just a PR post, but coming soon, to a CMS near you... WebCT Demos New Open Source Portfolio PowerLink at EDUCAUSE 2003:

WebCT, maker of the world's most flexible and widely used higher education e-learning solutions, this week will demonstrate a new PowerLink for WebCT Vista(TM) that enables the transfer of student files from WebCT Vista-powered courses to open source electronic portfolios. These files will then become part of a permanent personal record that students can selectively share with peers, professors and employers over their lifetime.

This new PowerLink for WebCT Vista is being developed using the WebCT Vista SDK, in coordination with the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI; www.theospi.org), a group advancing the use of e-portfolios. The OSPI PowerLink will be demonstrated at EDUCAUSE 2003 in Anaheim, Calif. OSPI's founding partners include experts from the University of Minnesota and the University of Delaware and the r-smart group.

I am quite sure that Blackboard is on the same track via their "Building Block" approach.

It will be curious to see if the CMSes act as a conveyer of content to and from eportfolios, or if their game is to suck them under the password protected hood. It is an important feature of an enterprise e-portfolio tool to provide portfolio artifacts that are institutional, program, or course authenticated, going beyond what an individual self-selects to add (leaving the individual hopefully in control of the public presentation).

Next on the horizon- WebCT and Bb take a bite at blogs. Bet on it.

And why should they not now pick up on RSS? There could be feeds for course catalogs, feeds for student assignments, course announcements, etc- the database to generate the content exists now, and it should be trivial to have code spawn the feeds.

blogged November 9, 2003 10:01 AM :: category [ eportfolios ]

Comments About "WebCT Opens Doors to OPSI e-portfolio"

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You don't need to bet on it... it's in their roadmap (which, um probably isn't online, but I guess if you get told non CiC it's OK to tell on, no?)

The thing which confused the hell out of me is that the pedestals (interconnectivity, openness, freedom, subversion etc.) upon which blogging grows are so diametrically opposed to big CMS stuff that I don't know!

Commented by: James Farmer on November 9, 2003 06:05 PM

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