Call for Participation: Next Generation IMS ePortfolio Work

Over the last year, IMS has gathered information about its members needs and the state of ePortfolio interoperability in the marketplace. Members, developers, policy makers and educators from several countries have met in London, Brisbane, and Ann Arbor to discuss possible paths forward. Those most engaged in the process have come to a consensus around a proposed course of action. The proposed new work on the IMS ePortfolio specification will take two forms, a maintenance release and a mapping between educational and workplace formats. 

Maintenance release
The IMS ePortfolio specification currently plays an important role in enabling the standards-based transfer and archiving of complete portfolios in higher education. It has been profiled for use throughout Dutch education by Kennisnet through the ePortfolio NL project and has been implemented on a number of ePortfolio platforms, such as PebblePad, Sakai/OSP, and Winvision. The experiences of these implementers have pointed to the need for stronger examples of portfolios encoded following the specification, more extensive best practices guidelines, and several minor technical enhancements. IMS proposes a maintenance release that would implement these suggestions, drawing primarily on materials already developed by ePortfolio NL and others.
 
Mapping the Transition Between Education and the Workplace in Cooperation with HR-XML
There is widespread agreement within the IMS and ePortfolio communities that facilitating the transition between education and the workplace is of utmost importance to the eventual success of ePortfolios in supporting lifelong learning. If ePorfolios prove effective in helping individuals manage this transition, the market for them will expand dramatically. Use of the IMS ePortfolio Specification in the highly successful Nedcar project in the Netherlands and in pilot projects in the UK has pointed to its limitations as a vehicle for linking up educational use of ePortfolios with human resource systems and employment services important in the workplace. Adapting the Specification for use in these settings would require a significant increase in complexity, exactly the opposite of that for which current and potential implementers have asked.

Instead, IMS proposes to collaborate with HR-XML to create mappings between both the IMS ePortfolio Specification and the several HR-XML specifications that are designed to accommodate similar information to a common semantic representation, using the core components (ISO 15000-5) approach that has proved successful in a range of e-business applications. This will enable easy translation from IMS ePortfolio, which will focus on the needs of education, and HR-XML, which is seeing widespread adoption by business. In addition, the syntax-neutral semantic representation will allow for independent mapping to any number of other relevant standards and specifications that may prove useful to individuals and institutions in managing data about learning and performance, such as Europass CV. This project will build on and coordinate with the work of the TAS3 project, which is focused on similar challenges using the core components approach and well-funded by the EU.

For these two initiatives to be successful, a core group of IMS members, preferably from both education and industry, along with other partners within the larger ePortfolio community, are needed to commit to carry the work forward. IMS invites you to participate. Our next step is to develop a charter for approval by the IMS Technical Advisory Board that further specifies the scope of the work and organizations that will carry it out. In addition, IMS is interested in adding additional Co-Chair organizations to help lead the work. If you are interested in joining this effort or learning more about it, please contact: PortfolioCall@imsglobal.org.