Survey/Quiz Tool inside ePortfolio (“Desert and a Floor Wax?”)

Audree has been busy…. she is the developer of the ePortfolio tool built first at Chandler-Gilbert Community College and also running in our office as “Maricopa eP” for the rest of our system.

Over the last few weeks, she has added new tools and features, based on faculty and student input, especially since at her college, the use of it has grown wider into a personal publishing system as well.

The first new thing is the ability to create an item type that is a survey or quiz. At first I scratched my head trying to figure out why such a thing would be embedded into an eP, but one could use it as a way of collecting feedback from peers or teachers, or it could be used as a course tool by faculty, or ….

So I quickly added a 3 item survey on “What is an ePortfolio?” to my eP play pen- if some of you readers out there would be so kind to respond to its deep probing questions, I can later share you what you can do with the results.

The other enhancement is a method to build a hierarchy of portfolio pages, again at the request of a faculty member at another one of our colleges. This makes sense as the tool more or less lodges all portfolio items into one drop down menu, and that could become unwieldy over time. So the new feature is an ability to have one item in that menu actually link to a whole collection of other portfolio pages.

A neat new example from our South Mountain Community College is an eP that describes their Storytelling Institute. The menu link for Storytelling Faculty brings up one of the “Collection” pages, but this time rather than a collection of files or documents, each item there is a link to another ePortfolio item (that then does not have to hang in the main menu).

It is not easy to describe, but Audree has listed some examples in her ePortfolio Enhancements collection whihc includes other minor new features- an ability to automatically have all changes published (previously, one made changes or added content, and then had to manually clicka button to make the changes visible), and to assign a password to individual pages… again at the request of faculty

Have you tracked a theme yet? The features in this tool are not dreamt up by programmers or academic theorists, but in the trenches teaching faculty, and they are being nicely integrated into the system as needed.

Does your expensive enterprise CMS do that for you?