1Learner Related Information and Artifacts
in the United States: A Comprehensive
Analysis of Projects and Practices
A report prepared for the Joint Information Systems Committee
by Darren Cambridge, Ph.D.
Last updated: 6/2/04
Learner Related Information and Artifacts in the United States:
A Comprehensive Analysis of Projects and Practices................................................ 1
Introduction..............................................................................................................3
IMS ePortfolio...........................................................................................................7
Background ...........................................................................................................7
Scope of Work .......................................................................................................8
Current State of Work ........................................................................................10
Future Development Trajectory ........................................................................10
Adoption...............................................................................................................11
Cross-links with JISC Work................................................................................11
HR-XML.................................................................................................................. 13
Background ......................................................................................................... 13
Scope of Work ..................................................................................................... 13
Current State of Work ........................................................................................ 17
Future Development Trajectory ........................................................................ 17
Adoption.............................................................................................................. 19
Crosslinks with JISC Work ............................................................................... 20
Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council....................................................... 21
Background ......................................................................................................... 21
Scope of Work .....................................................................................................22
Current State of Work ........................................................................................24
Future Development Trajectory ........................................................................25
Adoption..............................................................................................................25
Crosslinks with JISC work .................................................................................26
Open Source Portfolio Initiative........................................................................... 28
Background ........................................................................................................ 28
Scope of Work .....................................................................................................29
Current State of Work ........................................................................................33
Future Development Trajectory ........................................................................33
Crosslinks with JISC work .................................................................................34
Other Projects .........................................................................................................36
O*NET .................................................................................................................36
ACCESS ...............................................................................................................37
eFolio Minnesota ................................................................................................38

2National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research ..................................... 40
National Council for Continuing Education and Training.............................. 41
LionShare ............................................................................................................42
Summary of Recommendations ............................................................................43
Standards and Specifications Development.....................................................43
Harmonization of controlled vocabularies .......................................................44
ePortfolio Software Development .....................................................................46
ePortfolio Research ............................................................................................47
Works Cited............................................................................................................ 48

3Introduction
There are few standardized or mandated mechanisms for supporting the
documentation and planning of learning in postsecondary education and lifelong
learning in the United States. While the Federal Government has taken an
increasingly active role in overseeing primary and secondary education through
the No Child Left Behind legislation, regulation of learner information in higher
education is still left largely to the states.
The Federal Government’s most significant impact on individual students in
higher education is through financial aid programs, such as the Pell Grant and
Perkins Loan programs. For students to be eligible for these programs,
institutions must file annual reports through the Integrated Postsecondary
Education Data System (IPEDS), managed by the National Center for Education
Statistics. The learner information collected through IPEDS is minimal,
restricted to institutionally aggregated data on institutional characteristics,
completions, graduation rates (by subject, using the Classification of
Instructional Programs), and student financial aid.
While the data collected at the state level vary considerably, the National Center
for Public Policy and Higher Education concluded in both its 2000 and 2002
Measuring Up national studies that none of the states produced enough or high
enough quality information about learning to be evaluated on the effects of its

4higher education programs on the knowledge and skills of its residents (Ewell
2002). No state mandates standardized formats for learner information records
about individual residents, and none is likely to do so.
Since the cancellation of programs briefly funded in the mid-1970s, there has
been no meaningful national lifelong learning policy in the United States.
Workforce development is promoted, piecemeal, through programs such as the
Workforce Investment Act, Adult and Family Literacy Act, and Perkins
Vocational and Technical Education Act, mostly through grants to State
programs (Uhalde et al. 2003). Management of learner information is largely
uncoordinated among these programs. Support for individuals in documenting
their skills and planning educational activities has largely been left to the states
as well, except through small-scale, short-lived programs of the Departments of
Education and Labor, such as the 1999-2001 America’s Learning eXchange.
While a number of public-private initiatives have been launched to define the
skills necessary for success in the workplace, such as the Partnership for Twenty-
first Century Skills, their recommendations largely have yet to be incorporated
into higher education or workforce development policy on a national scale
(Partnership for 21st Century Skills 2003). States have made slightly more
progress in linking their workforce development programs to nationally-
recognized skills standards (Workforce Excellence Network 2002).
Despite the lack of comprehensive policy, there is an increasing realization in the
United States that documentation of knowledge, skills, and abilities is a valuable

5asset to individuals, therefore, calls for institutions of higher education to do a
better job of helping their students record and assess their competencies abound
(Carnevale and Desrochers 2001; Ewell 2002). This movement is being driven by
large-scale shifts in the demographics of the student population, the need to
contain escalating costs, increased demands from employers for better
information about what their employees know and can do, explosive growth in
the availability of private sector certifications, and the increasing availability of
technology that enables more sophisticated record keeping (Flynn 2003, 2004;
Lovett 2003; Carnevale and Desrochers 2001).
A variety of projects are under way in the United States to support the
documentation of learner information in the United States, especially through the
use of ePortfolios. While some of these projects are initiated or funded by state
and federal governments, most are conducted by higher education institutions,
technical standards and specification development bodies, and other non-profit
organizations. Funding for these initiatives comes primarily from the
organizations’ memberships and from private philanthropic foundations.
This study examines a selection of these projects most likely to have a national
impact in the United States and most closely related to standards for recording
learner information. It examines their history, scope, current status, future plans,
and breath of impact, and suggests crosslinks with the work of the Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC) on learner information. Throughout,
recommendations are made to the JISC about how to avoid divergence between

6its work in the UK and across Europe and similar work in the United States and
how to establish transatlantic interoperability of learning related information and
artifacts.
The JISC is already significantly invested in multiple projects seeking to establish
this interoperability within the UK and Europe. The JISC has been carrying out
work on learner profile and learner-related information in the area of standards
and in trial implementations under the JISC MLEs for Lifelong (1/01)
Programme. The standards-related work mapping both the UK Higher Education
Transcript and the EDS (European Diploma Supplement) to IMS Global Learning
Consortium Learner Information Package (LIP), was carried out by the JISC-
funded CETIS-CRA LIPSIG. The resulting LIP Transcript profile has been
contributed to the BSI (British Standards Institute) which helped initiate the BS
8788 (UKLeaP) work, based on a MoU with IMS. The EDS mapping has been
contributed to the CEN/ISSS WS/LT (Workshop for Learning Technology).
Given the recent commitment by the UK to adopt the EDS by 2005 as a precursor
to wider adoption across Europe by 2008, there is now a high level of political
interest in this area.
Additional work in the UK has been going on for some years in the area of
Personal Development Planning (PDP) and its associated Personal Development
Record (PDR), mainly coordinated by the Centre for Recording Achievement
(CRA). The JISC is supporting the detailed definition of fields for a PDR and their
mapping to LIP and, further, the trial implementation of these, also in the 1/01

7Programme. Further work is also being carried out through the EPICC (European
Portfolio Interoperability Consultative Committee) programme on ePortfolio.
JISC, through CETIS (Center for Educational Technology Interoperability
Standards), is participating in the IMS ePortfolio Development Committee.
This report profiles standards and specifications impacting learner-related
information and artifacts development by three organizations, IMS, HR-XML,
and the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council, and work on standards-
oriented software development by the Open Source Portfolio Initiative. It also
briefly introduces work on several other learner information research and
development projects with cross-sector, regional, or national scopes.
IMS ePortfolio
Background
Convened for the first time in May 2003, the IMS Global Learning Consortium
ePortfolio Requirements Committee spent the following six months developing a
charter detailing the scope of an ePortfolio specification development project.
The Committee gathered requirements from the IMS membership and from a
wide range of U.S. and British higher education institutions through use cases
and analysis of example portfolios and existing systems. Participants in the
development of the charter included Blackboard, CETIS, the Center for
Recording Achievement, EDUCAUSE, IBM, the Committee For Institutional

8Cooperation (a consortium of large Midwestern research universities), and the
University of California Berkeley. The charter was approved by the Technical
Board in December 2003. The ePortfolio Development Committee met in Zurich
in February, producing a Base Document, which was reviewed by the Technical
Board in April 2004. The Committee met again in May 2004 in Reston, Virginia
to develop a Public Draft of the Specification.
Scope of Work
The ePortfolio Specification is being developed to enable the portability of
portfolios between systems. Putting ePortfolio system behavior out-of-scope, the
Specification will focus exclusively on defining a data model for ePortfolios and
suggesting best practices for the use of that model. The Specification will define
two types of ePortfolios: presentation portfolios, which are designed to be shared
with particular audiences, and working portfolios, which are individuals’
complete repository of ePortfolio information, including multiple definitions of
subsets of the whole that may be used as presentation portfolios. The
Specification will define a data model that accommodates both types of
portfolios. As described within the current draft of the Information Model, a
portfolio may contain any number of parts, relationships between parts, and
presentations. Types of parts include affiliation, competency, goal, identification,
interest, participation, product, qualification, rubric, reflexion, and transcript.
Products, rubrics, and reflexions are likely to be detailed within the Specification,
while the other part types will be defined by references to LIP. Some changes to

9the corresponding LIP elements are desired, and recommendations for changes
to LIP have been developed. A vocabulary for describing types of relationships
between parts may be included but will not be normative. In general, the
Specification is unlikely to mandate any controlled vocabularies. Presentations
are sets of instructions for transforming the other contents of the portfolio.
Within a presentation portfolio, a presentation may be used to generate a
rendered version of the portfolio for consumption by an audience (as, for
example, a set of XHTML files). Within a working portfolio, a presentation may
be used to define a view, to select a subset of the whole portfolio.
In order to minimize redundancy and to speed adoption, the Specification will
profile existing specifications to the greatest possible extent. The specification
will likely profile LIP, Content Package, Reusable Definitions of Competencies
and Educational Objectives (RDCEO), and IEEE Learning Objects Metadata
(LOM). LIP will be significantly extended, often incorporating or adapting
extensions developed in BS 8788. While the W3C XML digital signature draft
recommendation may be referenced, its use will not be normative. Because no
existing specification or standard of which the committee was aware meets the
requirements related to rubrics, a new information model is being developed for
rubrics, making use of RDCEO. Because rubrics may have applicability in other
contexts, the rubric-related portion of the Specification is being written as a self-
enclosed set of documents that can be used independently of the rest of the
Specification.

10
Current State of Work
The ePortfolio Development Committee is writing the Public Draft. A draft of the
Information Model, a set of UML diagrams with explication similar to those
diagrams found in other recently adopted IMS specifications, has been
completed. A draft of a rubric specification has also been completed. IMS staff are
at work on bindings for both the main and rubric information models. An outline
for the Best Practices Guide has been written, and sections have been assigned to
team members.
Future Development Trajectory
The Development Committee is scheduled to deliver a Public Draft Specification
for a Technical Board vote on June 30, 2004. If the Specification passes, it will be
released to the public in mid-July 2004. The final version is scheduled to be
completed September 30, 2004.
In May 2004, the Committee submitted to IMS a set of recommended changes to
LIP, many of which parallel those suggested by the team developing BS 8788.
These requirements will be addressed in an upcoming revision of LIP, tentatively
scheduled to begin in the Fall of 2004 and to be completed in January 2005.

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Adoption
While no organization has yet publicly committed to adopting the forthcoming
Specification, several groups have expressed a strong interest. Blackboard has
participated actively in developing the specification and will likely implement it
at some point within its Content System, which includes ePortfolio functionality.
The Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) has included implementation of the
specification within its development plan for the Open Source Portfolio (OSP)
2005. ePortfolio system vendors Nuventive and ePortaro contributed to the
requirements gathering process. The later recognizes the value of standards, as
evidenced by its development of the EPIX specification, a simple ePortfolio
interoperability standard. The LionShare project may use the ePortfolio
Specification in conjunction with ePortfolio functionality planned for its client
software.
Cross-links with JISC Work
The IMS ePortfolio specification will almost certainly draw heavily on extensions
to LIP developed for BS8788. The IMS ePortfolio specification is being designed
to address a wider range of practices than BS8788 considers, while BS8788 will
provide much more detailed guidance to implementers on its use within the
range it treats. Moving forward, the communities implementing both IMS
ePortfolio and BS8788 will face significant challenges in establishing, sharing,
and building consensus around shared vocabularies for such components are
competencies, relationship types, and subject classifications. JISC and IMS

12
should work together closely to provide adoption support to their memberships
that addresses shared vocabulary issues. The JISC contingent working on
BS8788 has been well represented in the IMS work so far through the
participation of Simon Grant and Scott Wilson.
Andy Heath of Sheffield Hallam University, who is working on the EPICC project
on behalf of IMS Europe, co-chairs the ePortfolio Development Committee with
the author. While the results of early rounds of requirements gathering for EPICC
have been considered in the process of developing the Public Draft, continued
work on EPICC will almost certainly uncover needs not adequately addressed in
the IMS ePortfolio work completed in 2004. Great care should be taken to ensure
that the work of EPICC does not diverge significantly from the IMS ePortfolio
work. EPICC’s work products should build on the IMS work and push it forward.
Any interoperability specification development undertaken by EPICC ought to be
in the form of a profile of the IMS ePortfolio Specification. The EPICC reference
platform being built by Giunti Labs ought to implement the IMS specification
and should be tested for data model interoperability with US systems, such as
OSP, which are also implementing the specification.

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HR-XML
Background
Founded in 1999, HR-XML is a non-profit institutional membership organization
devoted to developing open XML specifications for the transfer of human
resources-related information. HR-XML’s membership includes most major
vendors of human resources management systems (HRMS) and enterprise
resource planning (ERP) software. While it is most prominent in the U.S., where
it is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, HR-XML has seen significant international
participation and adoption. HR-XML members meet quarterly, with at least one
meeting each year in Europe and the other meetings in the United States. While
HR-XML’s focus is on human resources, its leadership recognizes the growing
importance of exchanging information with education providers and of better
supporting its membership in facilitating employee personal and professional
development.
Scope of Work
While HR-XML’s focus in on human resources, much of the information
companies wish to collect and maintain about employees is similar to that which
learners and institutions collect and maintain about learning. HR-XML work
related to learner information includes completed work resumes and
assessments, ongoing work competencies, and recently commenced work on
profiling new hires.

14
HR-XML works from the bottom up, defining specifications for fairly simple
items, such as achievements or contact information, and then aggregating these
simple specifications into more comprehensive ones, such as Resume. Resume is
composed of several components related to learner information: Achievements,
Education History, Employment History, Licenses and Certifications, Publication
History, Speaking Events History, Languages, and Associations. The
specification is designed to accommodate information about each of these areas
at approximately the same level of detail as would customarily be included in a
paper resume or curriculum vitae. The specifications include no provision for
including supporting documents linked explicitly to any element, nor do they
include guidance on how to verify the authenticity of information contained
within a resume.
The Competencies specification is geared toward capturing loosely-structured
competency information, again similar to what might be found in a paper resume
or on an online job posting site. Competencies, by HR-XML’s definition, capture
knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics, . . . the type of
measurable, performance-related characteristics that are important to
numerous HR management processes. (Allen 2003)
Competency entries may include a definition, evidence, and a weight indicating
the relative importance of the competency in some context. Competencies may
reference external taxonomies, but the definition of these taxonomies is out of the
scope of the specification. The definition of a competency is unstructured.

15
However, competencies can be defined recursively to indicate relationships
among them. For example, competence in linear regression analysis might be
defined as part of competence in quantitative analysis. None of the current set of
HR-XML specifications mandate controlled vocabularies, and there are no plans
to develop or adopt any in the near future.
Like Competencies, the Assessment specification is relatively simple. Assessment
is primarily concerned with specifying the data structures needed to request and
receive assessment data. The Assessment Result itself is unstructured.
HR-XML is developing a New Hire specification to capture the information
collected by human resources departments at the time a new employee is hired.
In current practice, while a great deal of detailed information is collected during
the hiring process, very little of that information is used after a contract is signed.
Much of it is stored in information systems—if represented electronically at
all—incompatible with those used to track workers’ performance over time and
for workplace development and training. Often, the information is collected, not
directly by the company itself but by headhunters and recruiters who do not pass
the detailed information on or who share it in unusable format. HR-XML
members hope to make better use of this information across systems through
implementation of the New Hire specification. They also hope that having a
standardized method for collecting information will allow companies to more
efficiently collect information directly from applications, reducing the need to use
expensive and not always very effective headhunters. Like most of HR-XML’s

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products, the specification is being designed to facilitate the “hand off of data
between arms length trading partners” (Allen 2004). It should enable
management of interactions with hosted applicant tracking services, job boards,
learning and performance management systems, providers of competency
models developed by consulting firms, and licensure and certification systems.
Because there is currently not a great deal of cross-over between software
vendors in each of these areas, the need for standardization is particularly acute.
The New Hire specification will define a profile of an employee, a collection of
information that could be updated throughout the individual’s employment with
the firm. While this profile will include administrative information, such as
payroll data and background checks, much of its contents will detail the
employee’s learning and performance. Unlike Resume, the New Hire
specification is being developed to include comprehensive information about the
individual. This is likely to include demographic details, competencies and
assessment results, work history, and education information. Education
information will include transcripts and, possibly, ePortfolios. HR-XML hopes
that organizations’ collections of employee profiles will help them better track
their “human capital,” whom they employ and what they know. HR-XML’s
published case study of Accenture, an organization that depends on being able to
articulate its human capital to generate business, illustrates this need (HR-XML
Consortium 2003).

17
Current State of Work
Having adopted its first specification in 2000, HR-XML has been adopting and
revising specifications at a rapid pace ever since. Version 1.1 of the Competencies
specification was released on February 26, 2003. Version 2.1 of the Resumes
specification was released on September 1, 2003, drawing on earlier releases of
its component specifications. Version 1.0 of the Assessments specification was
adopted on November 21, 2003. Although some are very simple and are designed
only to be used in conjunction with others, there are now over 25 HR-XML
specifications.
A committee is meeting regularly to develop the New Hire specification. Most of
the major human resource management systems vendors are represented,
including SAP and PeopleSoft. They have developed a mind map of components
of the New Hire specification and are investigating ways to leverage existing HR-
XML work, adapt work from other standards and specification bodies, and
detemine what new pieces will need to be defined.
Future Development Trajectory
The IMS staff and leaders of the IMS ePortfolio Committee have begun
discussions with HR-XML about aligning work on the New Hire and ePortfolio
specifications. The leaders of the groups working on both specifications see a
great deal of overlap in content and purpose between the two specifications.
While an ePortfolio is an individual-focused and controlled record and a New

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Hire employee profile is an institutional record, both groups recognize the value
to both individuals and institutions in enabling exchange of learning and
performance information between ePortfolio and human resources systems. The
groups are likely to agree on a number of elements present in both specifications,
such as competencies and affiliations, on which to focus joint work.
IMS and HR-XML are also discussing ways to synchronize HR-XML’s
Competencies and IMS’s RDCEO in order to offer the HR community a more
structured way of defining competencies and to facilitate the circulation of
competency information between e-learning and HR systems. In the near term,
the two specifications will likely achieve a synchronized information model with
distinct bindings because of difference in technical approach. HR-XML has more
complex requirements for schema design, preferring use of the Open Application
Group’s methodology, which draws on the Schematron specification as well as
W3C XML schema (Jelliffe 2002).
The New Hire committee expects to complete its specification in late 2004 or the
first quarter of 2005. While the administrative sections will require significant
new development, approximately 75% of the specification will incorporate or
extend existing specifications, much as is true for the IMS ePortfolio project. The
New Hire work will likely include the revision of Competencies to make use of
RDCEO being discussed with IMS.

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Adoption
HR-XML’s mature specifications enjoy a high level of adoption with human
resource management systems. HR-XML offers a conformance testing service,
HR Certify. A complete list of certified systems can be found on HRCertify.org.
Of the learner-information-related specifications, Competencies and
Assessments are relatively new and not yet widely implemented. Resume is the
most ubiquitous, implemented in virtually every commercial resume parser.
These products include:
Resume Mirror/Revsolutions
http://www.revsolutions.com/product_rb.shtml
TextKernel
http://www.textkernel.nl/news.php?itemkey=0
Burning Glass
http://www.burningglass.com/LensXray.html
Tempworks
http://www.tempworks.com/Portal/uploads/ParsingAbstract.pdf
Kalki Resume Manager
http://www.kalkitech.com/ghire/ResumeParser.htm
mohoResume Extractor
http://www.mohomine.com/news/companynews20020109.asp
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/index.html?1465835.html

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Magnaware
http://www.magnaware.com
Crosslinks with JISC Work
The strongest connections between current HR-XML and JISC learner
information work are between UKLeaP and New Hire. Clearly, many of the data
collected in lifelong learner profiles and employee profiles, such as competencies
and assessment results, are complementary and overlapping. While the purpose
of a learning record is individual and an employee profile institutional, for their
learning records to be most powerful, individuals need to be able to share
information from within their records with institutions with whom they have a
relationship. Making sharing information about performance and learning
between individuals and employers easier and more efficient is likely to increase
employability and facilitate continuing education while in the workplace. Similar
connections exist between Resume and UKLeap, New Hire and EDS, and New
Hire and EPICC. UK HR-XML members are largely unaware of any of the current
JISC work, including UKLeaP, EDS, and EPICC. JISC should educate the HR-
XML community about these initiatives and work with IMS and HR-XML to
develop mappings between the UKLeaP, EDS, RDCEO, ePortfolio, Resume, and
New Hire and to align schema development processes for future work.

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Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council
Background
Formed in 1997, the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council is a non-profit
organization whose members include colleges and universities, associations, and
software vendors. Its missions is to produce standards “to enable the
improvement of institutional performance and foster collaboration across
educational communities in order to lower costs, improve service, and attain
system interoperability” (Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council). While the
organization’s stated domain is education, its focus is exclusively on the business
functions of colleges and universities. In the words of Executive Director Michael
Sessa, the Council “doesn’t do learning” (Sessa 2004). PESC’s work aims to serve
three business units within colleges and universities: registrars, admissions
offices, and financial aid offices. While these sectors are not directly involved in
promoting and documenting learning, they do collect and manage records that
may include evidence of learning, particularly academic transcripts.
PESC began its current focus on XML-based standards through the
establishment of the XML Forum for Education in 2000, which was renamed the
“Standards Forum” in 2003. The Standards Forum coordinates the work in each
of the three sectors represented by PESC, ensuring compatibility and coherence.
Work on standards related to each sector’s unique needs is “owned” by
organizations within that sector, who are responsible for their maintenance. In

22
the case of transcripts, the work is owned by the American Association of
Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), through its SPEEDE
committee. SPEEDE has coordinated the exchange of transcript data in US
higher education since the early nineties. Numerous student information system
vendors, the National Council for Higher Education Loan Programs (NCHELP),
and the U.S. Department of Education also participate in the Standards Forum.
NCHELP “owns” the CommonLine standard increasingly used for student
financial aid data.
Scope of Work
All standards adopted by PESC share a common components dictionary. The
dictionary defines reusable pieces of business information designed to be used
within standards for individual sectors. These standards can restrict, but may not
expand upon, the definitions within the core dictionary. The dictionary includes
information model specifications, such as element names and cardinalities, and
enumerated lists of code values. These enumerated lists map to established
controlled vocabularies in use within and across sectors. Prior to the ascendancy
of XML as an interchange format, SPEEDE developed electronic data interchange
standards for transcripts and other records through the American National
Standards Institute Accredited Standards Committee X12. The information
model from this work has been incorporated into the core dictionary. PESC terms
the complete collection of business information an institution maintains about a
student a “student portfolio.” This differs significantly from the use of the term

24
includes all of the small number of classification systems the Federal Government
requires colleges and universities to use in PESC’s three sectors. For learner
information, the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP), which defines
disciplines, areas, and fields of study, is more relevant. Transcript also allows the
coding of subject areas using the Higher Education General Information Survey
(HEGIS) codes, which have been replaced by CIP, and two types of Statistics
Canada University Student Information System codes, CSIS and USIS. XML
documentation is included within each of the schemas. Transcript allows for
user-defined extensions to support state college and university systems and
regional requirements (such as regional accreditation agency reporting
guidelines). Information represented through extension may be ignored by users
outside of the target community.
Current State of Work
A number of ANSI ASC X12 electronic data interchange formats developed prior
to the adoption of Transcript are in widespread use in student information
systems. There include:
• Student Transcript (Transaction Set 130)
• Acknowledgment of a Student Transcript (Transaction Set 131)
• Request for a Student Transcript (Transaction Set 146)
• Response to a Request for a Student Transcript (Transaction Set 147)
• Educational Testing Results Report and Request (Transaction Set 138)
(American Association of Registrars and Admissions Officers 2004).

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PESC has produced the Core Data Dictionary, a Library of Codes, and guidelines
for XML schema development and the use of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for
encryption of academic records. There are currently almost 600 core components
within the dictionary. The XML Postsecondary Transcript was adopted by PESC
members on April 30, 2004.
Future Development Trajectory
Near-term goals for PESC and SPEEDE related to Transcript include ratification
by the PESC membership of the CommonLine standard, development of a
College Transcript XML Implementation Guide, and development of a degree
audit standard. The SPEEDE committee is also at work on request, response, and
acknowledgement standards for transport and routing of transcripts using SOAP.
SPEEDE is developing crosswalk tables between the EDI and XML standards,
and members are developing EDI/XML translation software. PESC staff are
continuing to work with vendors and institutions to encourage widespread
adoption of Transcript.
Adoption
The University of Texas at Austin hosts a SPEEDE transcript server, which
processes 50,000 transcripts per month using these transaction sets, and has
handled over three million transcripts since its launch in 1995. The University of

26
Texas server already supports the XML Transcript standard, although most of its
traffic still uses the EDI formats. The EDI formats are widely supported by the
major student information system vendors. Vendors who have committed to
implementing XML Postsecondary Transcript include Datatel, SCT, Hersey
Business Systems, and the University of Florida. The CCTRAN project, which will
define a common infrastructure for managing and exchanging transcript
information for the California Community Colleges, includes support of
Transcript, with some system-specific extensions, as a requirement. The National
Student Clearinghouse, a degree verification service, supports both EDI and XML
versions of Transcript.
Crosslinks with JISC work
The most obvious intersection between PESC’s activities and JISC’s work on
learner information is between the XML Postsecondary Transcript and the UK
Transcript. Some information contained within PESC’s Transcript standard, such
as awards and assessment results, also overlaps with UKLeaP. Through its
Library of Codes, PESC has specified a significant collection of controlled
vocabularies for describing student information, some of which may be useful in
broader learner information contexts, especially the Classification of
Instructional Programs. However, PESC’s development goals differ significantly
from those of JISC. While both PESC and JISC are invested in helping their
members use IT standards to manage learner information more efficiently, PESC
focuses exclusively on capturing current practice for business reasons. The

27
approach JISC representatives have taken to developing UKLeaP and the
requirements generated for EPICC so far suggest that JISC is also interested in
shaping standards to help institutions and governments better support and more
accurately and completely document learning. PESC and SPEEDE are unlikely to
be interested in collaborating on this aspect of JISC’s work. Because of the high
likelihood of its widespread adoption and the desirability of facilitating learner
mobility between the US and UK, JISC should also analyze the XML
Postsecondary Transcript standard and consider developing a mapping between
it and specification and standards in use in the UK in collaboration with the
SPEEDE committee. JISC should make use of PESC’s work on controlled
vocabularies, where appropriate, in all of its learning projects.

28
Open Source Portfolio Initiative
Background
The Open Source Portfolio Initiative was founded in January 2003 by
representatives from the University of Delaware, the University of Minnesota,
and the r-smart group to develop an open source enterprise ePortfolio platform
for higher education. The University of Delaware contributed its experience
leading uPortal, one of the most successful enterprise-scale open source software
projects at the time in US higher education. The University of Minnesota
contributed the source code for its ePortfolio system, which had been developed
at the University of Minnesota Duluth, beginning in 1995. Based in Phoenix,
Arizona, r-smart, a commercial firm specializing in academic open source
software and services, provided commercial support, which had proven critical to
the sustainability of uPortal. Institutions represented in the leadership of OSPI
now include the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,
EDUCAUSE, Indiana University, the University of Michigan, the University of
Rhode Island, Upslopes (another Phoenix-based commercial firm, focused on
primary and secondary education), and Virginia Tech University. While so far
primarily driven by the needs of large, public universities in the US, the OSPI is
seeking better representation from other types of institutions, such as community
colleges; from other educational sectors, such as K-12 and workplace training;
and from developers outside of the United States.

29
The OSPI leadership is made up of three groups, the Board, Council, and
Committers. The Board is responsible for the financial management of the OSPI,
community building, and handling collaborations with other organizations. The
Council determines the conceptual and functional direction of the Initiative. The
Committers contribute code and documentation. The leadership is intended to be
composed of members of the larger ePortfolio community who have made
substantial contributions to OSPI in one or more of these areas.
The ePortfolio system developed by the OSPI is called Open Source Portfolio
(OSP). In December of 2003, OSPI received a $518,000 grant from the Mellon
Foundation for a major redesign of OSP, OSP 2.0. Indiana University and the r-
smart group, who provided the match for the grant, are the primary developers of
version 2.0.
Scope of Work
While not a specification or standard development project in and of itself, the
OSPI is included here as a de facto reference platform for a number of emerging
specifications important to ePortfolio and other learner information applications.
The OSPI was formed to develop
an enterprise electronic portfolio application … [that] … simultaneously
meets the needs of individuals to manage personal and professional
records as well as institutions to perform system and program assessment.
(Open Source Portfolio Initiative)

30
In the long term, OSPI intends for its platform to be used as a lifelong learning
tool, in primary, secondary, higher, and continuing education and in the
workplace. However, the near term development work is focused on meeting the
needs of U.S. higher education.
Even with this narrow focus, serving both the needs of individuals and
institutions has been challenging. Barrett and Wilkerson contrast “assessment
management systems” with “electronic portfolios” (Barrett and Wilkerson 2004).
While both share a “digital archive of learning artifacts,” assessment
management systems focus on institutional purposes, often imposing an
inflexible structure on the contents and organization of a portfolio and
institutional control over access to portfolio data. Electronic portfolios offer
individuals more flexibility in contents, organization and visual design and give
them control over who gets to see what, when. OSP 2.0 has been conceived as a
“balanced assessment system,” accommodating both the institutional need to
manage workflow and mandate portfolio structure for particular institutional
purposes and the individual need for flexibility and expressive power.
The University of Minnesota software, on which the 1.0 and 1.5 releases of OSP
are largely based, offers little flexibility to individuals to control the structure and
presentation of the contents of their portfolios. Information and documents are
added to portfolios within a hierarchy of categories and elements that is designed
and controlled centrally by the hosting institution. In version 1.5, individuals can
be provided with a choice of templates for sharing views of their portfolios.

31
However, templates must also be institutionally designed and controlled.
Individuals control whom their portfolios are shared with and which reader
comments are visible to others. Structured portfolio information cannot be
imported or exported in any standardized format.
Version 2.0 accommodates both institutional and individual purposes by making
powerful tools for (using the IMS terminology) managing evidence within a
working portfolio, creating presentation portfolios, and specifying structure of
workflow for assessment processes to all users. Users each have a workspace in
which they can collect, organize, define relationships within, and reflect on
evidence of learning and performance. This evidence may consist of files
uploaded into the system or information entered into templates (forms) made
available to the portfolio owner. As in 1.5, some templates can be used to define
views of a subset of the information within an individual’s workspace and to
specify how that information should be presented visually to readers. Unlike in
1.5, however, individuals can design templates themselves. (In early releases, they
will need to be able to write XSLs. Template design tools will be added in later
releases.) Institutions will be able to provide what OSPI is terming scaffolding to
individuals to guide them through formal portfolio development and assessment
processes. Scaffolding can include matrixes and rubrics to guide the organization
and evaluation for portfolio information and wizards and workflows to guide
process. Like templates, individual and well institutional users will be able to
create and share scaffolding. Scaffolding, templates, and presentations can be
shared through common interest groups, which can be defined both by the

32
institution and individuals. In future versions, common interest groups will be
able to integrate a suite of collaboration tools to make possible richer interactions
around shared portfolios.
The technical architecture of OSP uses open source and standards-based
technologies. OSP, a J2EE application, can run within open source application
servers, such as Apache Tomcat, utilizing open source databases, such as MySQL
or PostgreSQL. Version 2.0 will integrally implement or support a number of
open standards and specifications. It uses the Spring Application Framework
(Spring J2EE/Java Application Framework). It will implement the Technology
Portability Profile (TPP) being developed by the SAKAI project. The TPP
integrates the JSR-168 portlet specification with Open Knowledge Initiative Open
Service Interface Definitions (OSID) “to create a services-based, enterprise portal
for tool delivery” (Sakai Project 2003). The TPP enables OSP to share common
services with other enterprise systems and to exchange application modules with
other systems. For example, OSP 2.0 is likely to make use of the workflow engine
originally developed for Indiana University’s Navigo assessment tool through
TPP, which incorporates the Workflow OSID. TPP might also allow other TPP-
compliant systems to reuse OSP’s Workspace tool, which provides powerful
personal content management functionality, drawing on the Apache Jarkarta
Slide project. While OSPI is not directly involved in the development of the TPP,
there is significant overlap of technical and managerial staff between the two
projects through Indiana University. OSPI is likely to implement TPP prior to its
public release and will contribute feedback to the developers and to OKI based on

33
this experience. When OSPI and OKI developers met in the Spring of 2003 to
discuss interoperability needs for ePortfolios, they concluded that, while existing
OSIDs might need revision to support ePortfolio applications, the needed
changes can not be identified accurately until the process of implementation has
begun. OSP 2.0 will implement part of IMS LIP and, probably, the IMS ePortfolio
Specification if it is approved in time to fit into the OSPI’s aggressive
development schedule.
Current State of Work
Version 1.0 of OSP, the first open source version developed from the University of
Minnesota system, was released at the end of July 2003. The current stable
release is 1.0.4. There have been over 1,600 downloads of v.1.0.x to date. Version
1.5, a “facelift” featuring interface improvements and templates, was released in
beta in early March 2004. The full functional requirements for version 2.0 were
turned over to the Indiana and r-smart developers in early February 2004. The
version 2.0 development team is making excellent progress and expect to meet
their scheduled release dates.
Future Development Trajectory
The first beta release of version 2.0 is scheduled for June 30, 2004. This version
will include a limited feature set and is intended for pilot use at selected
committer institutions. Quarterly releases will be issued throughout 2004 and

34
2005, with the first full production release of 2.0 in the fall of 2005. The final
release funded through the Mellon grant will be in December 2005.
Throughout this period, OSPI leadership will be seeking additional funding and
increased volunteer participation. The character of these emerging contributions
will help shape the future direction of the Initiative. Several major academic
software vendors, such as WebCT, have expressed an interest in integrating their
products with OSP. OSPI is also exploring ways to connect with other open
source academic software projects, such as LionShare, a centrally authenticated
peer-to-peer personal content management system (see LionShare section
below), and the Visual Understanding Environment (VUE), a networked concept
mapping tool being developed at Tufts University (Services 2004). The level of
international interest in OSPI is high, with 24% of source code downloads
originating outside of the U.S. Work on a Spanish language version is planned.
Crosslinks with JISC work
OSP is the most powerful and flexible open source portfolio system currently
available. When the full production 2.0 release is complete in the summer of
2005, OSP will rival or exceed all currently available commercial systems as well.
OSP 2.0’s feature set is well suited to personal development record keeping, and
its open architecture should allow it to be customized easily to accommodate the
BS8788, UK HE Transcript, and European diploma Supplement formats and for

35
integration with existing MLEs and other enterprise systems. Many JISC
institutions would benefit from contributing to core OSP development or using
OSP as a basis for customized applications. OSP would certainly benefit from
both conceptual and technical input from JISC-supported developers with
experience building systems to support personal development planning and
portfolios development. JISC should consider funding UK institutions exploring
collaborative development projects with OSPI. When OSPI opens nominations to
fill two seats on its Council in early June 2004, JISC should support the
nomination of a UK-based ePortfolio. Any JISC institution that embarked on a
coordinated development project with OSPI would be eligible to become a
Committer.
OSPI’s work always overlaps with the development of a reference platform for
EPICC. JISC should urge EPICC participants to make their recommendations
for ePortfolio system functionality and interoperability available to the OSPI and
should establish a partnership to demonstrate portfolio portability between OSP
and the EIPCC platform through a coordinated implementation of the
forthcoming IMS ePortfolio specification.

36
Other Projects
While less directly related to JISC’s work on learner information standards, a
number of other projects may offer useful input and are worth tracking. These
include the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET, the Public Broadcasting Service’s
ACCESS project, the eFolio Minnesota project run by the Minnesota State College
and Universities, the American Association for Higher Education and Clemson
University’s National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, and a planned
project to be coordinated by the National Center for Continuing Education and
Training.
O*NET
The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) has been developed by the
O*NET Consortium for the US Department of Labor. O*NET is the primary
national collection of occupational information for the United States. O*NET
includes a database that classifies occupations and tracks the skills, content
knowledge, and worker characteristics required by or associated with each
occupation (Employment and Training Agency 2004). The O*NET database
includes a controlled vocabulary for occupational titles, the O*NET-SOC
(Standard Occupational Titles), which replaces the Dictionary of Occupational
Titles.

37
Based on research and jobs and organizational analysis, information is included
within the database across six domains: worker characteristics, “enduring
characteristics that might influence both performance and the capacities to
acquire knowledge and skills required for effective work performance;” worker
requirements, “descriptors referring to work-related attributes acquired and/or
developed through experience and education;” experience requirements,
“requirements related to previous activities, explicitly linked to certain types of
activities;” occupational characteristics, “variables that define and describe the
general characteristics of occupations that may influence occupational
requirement;” occupation requirement, “a comprehensive set of variables of
detailed elements that describe what various occupations require;” and
occupation-specific information, a reflection of other elements “in terms of
selected or specific occupations” (O*NET Consortium). The O*NET database and
its data dictionary are available on the O*NET website, which also includes a
number of tools for searching the database online and crosswalks between
O*NET-SOC and other classification systems. The O*NET-SOC vocabulary may
be useful to JISC in its UKLeaP, EPICC, and diploma supplement work for
guiding implementers in recording work-related learner information.
ACCESS
In 1999, the Public Broadcasting Service Adult Learning Service launched Project
ACCESS project, which was to provide decision-making and advising services.
ACCESS was to serve as a “brokering service” and a “lifelong learning career

38
management account,” connecting students with online higher and continuing
education services. It was funded by a three-year grant from the Fund for the
Improvement for Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and a $200,000 grant from
the Department of Labor. The ACCESS project was to provide a suite of online
tools, including an exploration center to help individuals discover their interests,
an education center to help them discover talents, a career opportunities center
to define goals, a strategy and planning center to help them plan using
information for the other centers, and a portfolio center for the collection of
“career, education, and strategy material” (PBS Adult Learning Service). The
ACCESS project was designed to enhance American’s Learning eXchange (ALX),
a national Department of Labor project with similar goals. The ALX was
discontinued when the Bush administration took power in 2001. The fate of the
ACCESS project is unclear. While no ACCESS project services are currently
available in the Adult Learning Services website and PBS staff did not respond to
requests for updated information, the project page does promise a release “in the
fall.”
eFolio Minnesota
eFolio Minnesota is a project of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities
(MnSCU), a system of 33 institutions, primarily two-year technical and
community colleges. It provides any resident of the State of Minnesota or student
at a State of Minnesota school the opportunity to create an electronic portfolio.
Residents are encouraged to “create a living showcase of [their] education, career

39
and personal achievements” in order to “reach their career and education goals”
(Minnesota State Colleges and Universities). Using software developed by Avenet
Web Solutions, a St. Paul, Minnesota software company, users register as a
worker, student, or educator. The software provides a different set of templates
for each type of user, based on their perceived needs. While some institutions
within the system are using eFolio in formal curricular settings, the project is
primarily focused on supporting individual workers, educators, and learners in a
manner complementary to UK initiatives. At present, it is the only project of its
kind in the United States. Over 10,000 electronic portfolios have been created
thus far, and the eFolio system receives approximately 1.2 million hits each
month. MnSCU has commissioned an external evaluation study, to be conducted
by the author, to research how residents are using eFolio, their perceptions of its
impact, and the kinds of support they are receiving in building and using their
portfolios from schools, colleges, universities, workforce development centers,
and other institutions. The study will combine survey and case study research to
uncover general patterns of use and to provide more detailed analysis of
particularly promising uses. The results of the evaluation will be made public in
the fall of 2004. The JISC should track this research, disseminate the results to
institutions it supports engaged in similar projects, and investigate intersections
with JISC-supported personal development planning research.

40
National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research
Despite the very high level of interest and activity around ePortfolios as a tool to
promote learning in the US, very little research documenting ePortfolios’ effects
has been performed outside of the discipline of teacher education. (For a review
of promising research and research practices in US teacher education, see Joanne
Carney’s 2004 AERA paper (Carney 2004).) Most research studies have focused
on a single institution using less than rigorous methodologies. The National
Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, a joint project of the American
Association for Higher Education (AAHE) and Clemson University’s Pearce
Center, is designed to address the need for better research on electronic
portfolios. Commencing in the summer of 2004, the Coalition is a three-year
project to engage thirty higher education institutions in systematic, coordinated
research on “what learning is taking place as a function of digital portfolios”
(American Association for Higher Education 2003). Participating institutions will
agree on research questions, methodologies, and reporting mechanisms through
meetings at AAHE’s Assessment Conference and at a Clemson’s Portfolio
Institute. The participating institutions for 2004-2005 are Alverno College,
Bowling Green State University, Indiana University Purdue University
Indianapolis, LaGuardia Community College, Mississippi State University,
Northern Illinois University, Portland State University, Stanford University,
University of Washington, and Virginia Tech University. JISC should track the
progress of this research to apply it to its ongoing work on personal development
planning and ePortfolios.

41
National Council for Continuing Education and Training
The National Council for Continuing Education and Training (NCCET) hosted a
national colloquium on the future of the academic transcript in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, in May 2003, convening leaders from higher education institutions,
professional organizations, government, and business. The results of the
participants’ work are detailed in a whitepaper published late in 2003 (Flynn
2003). The whitepaper contains recommendations to the Board of the American
Association of Community Colleges about reforming academic transcripts to
better support the transition between education and the workplace. It advocates
using transcripts to document knowledge, abilities, and skills, especially “soft
skills” not bound to a particular discipline or profession, such as critical thinking.
Both non-credit learning activities and credit-bearing courses should be included,
and ePortfolios should be employed as a tool for collecting, verifying, and sharing
this information. Acting on these recommendations, the NCCET plans to launch a
pilot project in the fall of 2004 with six to eight community colleges working with
local employers across several regions across the US focused on using ePortfolio-
based transcripts to enhance workforce development. Like the eFolio Minnesota
project, NCCET and its partners will offer the service directly to members of the
community, not just to currently enrolled students. This project may provide
another model for future JISC-supported initiatives.

42
LionShare
Funded by the Mellon Foundation and based at Pennsylvania State University,
the LionShare project is building an open source infrastructure for sharing
learning resources over a federation of centrally authenticated peer-to-peer
networks (LionShare 2003). LionShare will eventually feature an extensible
architecture enabling implementers to build application-specific tools on top of
the general purpose infrastructure. LionShare’s leaders envision the LionShare
client as a tool for personal content management, allowing efficient, trusted
sharing of learning information amongst peers and in interaction with
institutionally-based repositories. Developers at the University of Florida plan to
build ePortfolio functionality on top of LionShare client. LionShare and the OSPI
have discussed the possibility of using the LionShare network for peer-to-peer
sharing of ePortfolio information between OSPI installations and for interaction
between personal and institutional ePortfolio tools. LionShare offers a promising
hybrid centralized-decentralized architecture which offers both a complement
and an alternative to the centralized client-server architecture of all currently
available enterprise ePortfolio systems. JISC should support the LionShare-OSPI
collaboration, encouraging both projects to implement the IMS ePortfolio
specification. JISC should also analyze the LionShare architecture during the
requirements gathering process for EPICC.

43
Summary of Recommendations
Given the volume and speed of learner-related information standards, software,
and research development on both sides of the Atlantic, now is a crucial time for
the JISC to align its work with its North American counterparts and to cultivate
partnerships that will lead to international interoperability. This study concludes
with a summary of recommendations to the JISC in the areas of standards and
specification development, harmonization of controlled vocabularies, ePortfolio
software development, and ePortfolio research.
Standards and Specifications Development
Continue participation in the IMS ePortfolio Development Committee.
The IMS ePortfolio Development Committee is an excellent venue through which
to engage with US-based projects. Prominent organizations working on learner
information and ePortfolios in US higher education are well-represented on the
Committee, and several major vendors and development consortia in the US have
a strong interest in adopting the ePortfolio specification being produced by this
group. Careful attention should be paid to ensure that this specification does not
substantially conflict with UKLeaP and the deliverables of EPICC.
Collaborate with HR-XML.
HR-XML’s large and diverse membership is representative of the human
resources sector in the United States. Many of its members are multinational

44
corporations likely to have substantial operations in the UK (HR-XML). JISC
should explore ways to participate in the development of HR-XML’s New Hire
specification and in its efforts to align its work with that of IMS. The New Hire
specification will describe an employee profile containing information about
competencies, educational history, assessment results, and a number of other
elements that overlap with the contents of UKLeaP and the EDS. Scheduled to be
completed in late 2004 or early 2005, the specification may make use of IMS
RDCEO and ePortfolio specifications. IMS and HR-XML are in talks about how
to work together to align their existing specifications and development processes,
especially their schema development practices. JISC should ensure that
standards and specifications development projects in which it plays a role also
align their schema development practices with IMS and HR-XML in order to ease
future integration.
Harmonization of controlled vocabularies
Review and make use of PESC codes and source vocabularies.
The Postsecondary Education Standards Council (PESC) has developed a Library
of Codes used in its XML Data Dictionary and in all of its specifications, including
the recently approved XML Transcript (Postsecondary Electronic Standards
Council). The vocabularies and taxonomies incorporated into the Library are in
widespread use in admissions, registrars’, and financial aid offices throughout US
higher education and include all the classification schemes mandated by the
Federal Government, including the Classification of Instructional Programs

45
(CIP). In developing international controlled vocabularies for use in transcripts
and learner profiles, JISC should review and make use of this resource. JISC
might also consider developing a mapping between the UK Transcript and XML
Transcript standards. However, PESC’s level of interest in international
collaboration on learner information appears to be low. PESC focuses on the
business functions of higher education and is not directly interested in promoting
learning.
Review and make use of O*NET .
O*NET is a national project, funded by the US Department of Labor, that
classifies occupations and tracks the skills, content knowledge, and worker
characteristics required by or associated with each occupation (Employment and
Training Agency 2004). The O*NET database includes a controlled vocabulary
for occupational titles, the O*NET-SOC (Standard Occupational Titles), and a
taxonomy of skills. O*NET provides crosswalks to other common classifications,
such as the Department of Labor’s deprecated Dictionary of Occupational Titles
(DOT), and to State and occupation-specific skills standards. JISC should review
and make use of the O*NET-SOC, O*NET content model, and O*NET database in
projects that reference skills and occupations.

46
ePortfolio Software Development
Promote engagement in the OSPI and interoperability with OSP.
The Open Source Portfolio Initiative is the most advanced and most standards-
based US ePortfolio software development project in progress. Version two of the
Open Source Portfolio (OSP 2.0) will feature an open architecture based on Open
Knowledge Initiative, Java Community Process, and W3C specifications and will
include a powerful and flexible feature set that can readily accommodate UK
learner profile formats and personal development planning practices (Open
Source Portfolio Initiative). Many institutions served by JISC would benefit from
evaluating OSP for adoption and engaging in customization, integration, and
ongoing development as OSPI Committers. Because OSP is likely to capture a
significant portion of the US and international ePortfolio higher education
market, JISC should ensure that the OSPI and the developers of the EPICC
reference platform make both systems interoperable through coordinated
adoption of the IMS ePortfolio specification.
Collaborate with OSPI and LionShare on architecture best practices.
The LionShare project, a peer-to-peer network infrastructure and personal
content management system, provides an alternative and complementary
architecture to the currently dominant client-server model for collecting and
exchanging learner information (LionShare). Developers at the University of
Florida plan to add ePortfolio functionality to the standard LionShare client,
making use of the IMS ePortfolio specification. LionShare and OSPI are

47
discussing ways to integrate the two systems. JISC should track the development
of both projects and engage their developers in discussions of ePortfolio and
learner information software architecture best practices.
ePortfolio Research
Track eFolio Minnesota and National Coalition on Electronic Portfolio
Research.
The eFolio Minnesota project offers all residents of the State of Minnesota the
opportunity to create a lifelong ePortfolio (Minnesota State Colleges and
Universities). The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities has recently funded
research on how citizens are using this service and how to better support the
most promising uses identified. Co-sponsored by the American Association for
Higher Education and Clemson University, the National Coalition on Electronic
Portfolio Research will coordinate research on the impact of ePortfolio use at
thirty US and Canadian Universities over three years (American Association for
Higher Education 2003). JISC should track this research and seek to locate
connections to research on ePortfolios and personal development planning being
performed in the UK and Europe.

48
Works Cited
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———, ed. 2003. Competencies. version 1.1 ed: HR-XML.
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Barrett, Helen, and J. Wilkerson. Conflicting Paradigms in Electronic Portfolio
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———. 2004. Why Not Assess and Document All Learning? Learning Abstracts.
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———. 2004. eFolio Minnesota: Your Electronic Showcase. Minnesota State Colleges
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Open Source Portfolio Initiative. 2004. The Open Source Portfolio Initiative [cited 5/3
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———. 2004. Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council. Postsecondary Electronic
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