Please consider participating in the development of a new group to profile and prototype the IMS ePortfolio Specification. The primary focus of the new Profile and the accompanying prototype will be to ease adoption by establishing a core best practice.

The current version of the Specification does a good job of addressing the comprehensive requirements gathered during its development. These encompass the immediate and anticipated interoperability needs of a diverse group of organizations from a variety of educational sectors and countries. The resulting requirements were similarly varied to enable practice as opposed to establish 'best practice'. This resulted in a complex specification that can be expensive to implement. While highly successful implementations exist, such as the Nedcar project in the Netherlands built using Giunti's ePortfolio system, the ePortfolio specification does not have widespread adoption.

The best path towards increasing adoption for comprehensive interoperability is to produce an appropriate best practice profile against which a conformance program can be established. The goal for a profile and prototype will be to address a more tightly focused set of common needs in an easier to implement and more flexible manner. This will still be based upon the combination of the IMS GLC Content Packaging with IMS GLC Learner Information Package specifications thereby sustaining all of the core functionality. Further work integrating more IMS GLC specifications with ePortfolio will focus on: the usage of IMS GLC Reusable Definitions of Competencies and Educational Objectives (RDCEO); and improved interoperability with Enterprise Systems, in particular Outcomes reporting for individuals, using the IMS GLC Enterprise Services v2.0 specification.

The profile will allow for lower stakes adoption, giving members the opportunity to judge the prudence of further investment in interoperability through analysis of the actual practices of their customers.

The specific focus and approach of the profile and prototype will be determined by the members of the team. One approach will be to examine the relationships between competencies (learning outcomes) and evidence in portfolios. Rather than representing the whole portfolio in a structured way, the relationships between competencies and portfolio evidence could be embedded in the human-readable XHTML of the portfolio using RDFa, Microformats, or some similar technique. Such an approach would enable developers to build on existing functionality and would allow additional flexibility to accommodate diverse portfolio structures and contents. It would also build on the Relationships structure and vocabulary in the current specification, and parallels recently initiated work on the LEAP 2.0 standard.

To indicate your interest, please send an email to portfolio@imsglobal.org by 15 September 2007.