UPOU ePortfolio Starter Guide Version 0.3

Prepared by:

Al Francis D. Librero May 16, 2015

A Little Background As constituents of the Bachelor of Arts in Multimedia Studies (BAMS), you are expected to have a firm grasp of the theoretical aspects of multimedia and how to put them in practice. Your aptitude is supposed to improve as you progress in your residency. Unfortunately, tracking your progression has historically been a challenge. Numerical grades do not tell the whole story of your performance in a course, nor does the GWA in your transcript of records. They do not paint a holistic picture of what you have done from beginning to end. These can lead to the capacity of students and graduates being unfairly assessed. UPOU’s ePortfolio site was conceived to help address issues on multiple fronts. In the case of students, an ePortfolio provides students space outside courses they are enrolled in, but still within the university’s system. It is a means to make sense of academic and even personal expression beyond the online classrooms. This helps further increase overall learning effectiveness as the tendency is for students to do so with a holistic perspective. For faculty, an ePortfolio can act as an assessment tool which can be more ideal for skills-oriented courses where it is more appropriate to evaluate students based on how they are able to apply what they learned than through more traditional tools such as examinations. They will also have an easier means of knowing more about students and how they are outside the courses they handle when necessary, allowing for more effective academic advising. Implementing the system itself, however, is only the first and arguably the simplest part of the process. The system will be judged by the quality and quantity of its content, as well as the traffic and activity generated. That means the success of ePortfolios, either from an individual or at a system level, rests on to you. What is an ePortfolio? An electronic portfolio, or ePortfolio, is a collection of digital artifacts of your creation – evidence of what you know and how capable you are of applying them. It can come in the form of just about anything – a document containing your term paper for a course, slideshows for a report you presented, a set of blogs, videos you produced as course projects… the list goes on.

Instead of tucking all these files away in your hard drive to be forgotten, or worse, deleted, you can opt to put it out there for others to see. You belong to the BAMS program, much of what you do in your courses are meant to be seen by the public. And the ePortfolio gives you an organized means of doing just that. Welcome to Mahara The current incarnation UPOU’s ePortfolio is powered by Mahara (https://mahara.org), an open source content management system designed specifically for building ePortfolios. As of this writing, the site is running Mahara version 15.04. Therefore, its corresponding manual (http://manual.mahara.org/en/15.04/) fully applies. Look it up online or download the PDF or epub version for your reference. There are two things you need to figure out in order to build an ePortfolio:

• Content - what are you going to put in it; and • Pages – how are you going to present them

As additional reference, feel free to go through my own account in the site. By no means should you be compelled to work on your own ePortfolio the way I did with mine. Chances are, what you see now will change several times over time. But you can consider it, particularly the profile page, as a general idea on what you should have for yourself. Signing Up While full integration is included in the long term plans, as of this writing (first trimester AY 2014-2015), UPOU ePortfolios is independent of the rest of the existing learning management system of UPOU. For the sake of convenience and the feel of single-sign on, when registering, use your MyPortal username and your UPOU email address for UPOU ePortfolios. After registration, a confirmation email will be sent to your address. Make sure to check your spam folder in case it doesn’t reach your inbox. Content Content, or artifacts (or artefacts), as they are called, are evidences of how you applied whatever you have learned. It comes in just about any form of digital media. Blog entry, essays, pictures, videos, artwork, or even your term papers and theses – nearly anything you produce in fulfilment of course requirements can be regarded as artefacts. Your ePortfolio can act as a repository for all of that.

Your Profile The first artefact you will need to build is your profile. Make sure to fill all the fields in the Profile’s About me tab, of which there are currently five: first name,

last name, student ID, display name and introduction. To start, you do not need to fill the fields in the other tabs if you are not comfortable sharing the personal information being asked of you (especially contact numbers). However, it is helpful for you to do so, especially if you are maintaining a personal website or blog. It may also be important for faculty or fellow students to know at least a general idea of where you reside in (the current version of the system has fields for town, region and country). You are strongly encouraged to upload your actual present likeness as a profile picture (instead of your dog, your celebrity idol, or yourself when you were a baby). We belong to an online university where seeing each other in person is not a common occurrence. Seeing how you really look like and what’s in your profile may as well be the best means for many of us to get to know you. Files As of this writing, each user is given a 100MB quota for files you would wish to upload as part of your ePortfolio. You can upload just about anything. But plan this carefully. First, make full use of the file and folder system to keep things in order. It’s much easier to work on it from the start rather than having to do clean up your clutter years from now. Second, it is recommended to prioritize what you want to upload. One hundred megabytes is not a lot by today’s standards. Therefore, it is recommended to have large files, such as videos elsewhere, like in Youtube or Vimeo (more on embedding external media later). Journal This is Mahara’s built-in blogging feature. It is hardly any different from posting in MyPortal or just about any other blogging system. If a course requires you to write blogs, this is where you should post them. The additional thing you might want to be conscious of is making use of tags. This makes sorting your journal entries easier. For example, tag all your blogs written for Multimedia Studies 100 with MMS 100 plus anything else you find pertinent. Regularly save your work as you write (for that matter, keep copies of your blogs locally in your computer for good measure). But keep the Draft check box ticked until the time comes when you’re ready to post your entry in public. Also make sure to keep the Allow comments check box ticked. You never know when someone wants to provide insightful replies to what you write. Resume Feel free to fill up the resume component of your ePortfolio to complete your profile. It can be published in its entirety or in bits and pieces across your ePortfolio. This may or may not be a priority as far as most coursework are concerned. But your resume may just be one of the first things which third party viewers (such as prospect employers or the open public as a whole) would like to look at.

Portfolio You will also need to figure out how you want to format all your content. Mahara allows you to create pages with multiple options with regards to formatting. By default, your Mahara account will already have a Dashboard page (your home page when you log in) and a Profile page (what other users see when they click the link to your profile). Obviously, working on the latter should be your priority.

Pages and Collections A page contains artefacts of your choosing. There are different things which you can include in a page. A profile page will automatically be included in your account when you create it. There is a lot of freedom beyond that. However, it is recommended that you create pages for every course you take in BAMS. Some will require it, anyway. This would typically contain artefacts such as you blogs, assignments or whatever else is required of you. Collections, on the other hand, are multiple pages grouped together. Creating collections is particularly useful if you want to organize certain course pages, or if you want to have some degree of separation between academic and non-academic pages. Layout and Blocks Mahara allows for a number of different page layouts. Feel free to be as creative as you want to be with how you want to present yourself to the rest of the university. But if you are unsure of how to begin, it’s not a bad to have a 2- or 3-row layout, with the top row having only a single column (usually used for your logo or a banner). Artefacts are laid out in blocks. All you need to do is drag from the left menu and drop to your page layout, according to your preference. Just keep in mind that it’s best that you already have at least a handful of artefacts to play around with. As I have implied, your profile is a reflection of yourself. Until you are told otherwise, you have a substantial amount of freedom with your layout. The important thing is that the content is there. And by no means is the layout you start with final. Through time, it is almost certain that you will want to try out different ways as to how you want to present your ePortfolio. As an, example, Figure 1 shows a screenshot of what I began with. I don’t even know if it will look the same by the time you make it to the site. Additional pages At some point, you will want, or even be required to create new portfolio pages. For example, you can have a page dedicated to your photography work while have another for your video, and so on. There is currently no limit to how many pages you can create. But all the same, it is a good idea to keep your ePortfolio as

space-efficient and navigation-friendly as possible, at least for the sake of your viewers.

Figure 1. Edit window of my profile page.

In addition, it will be a good idea to create pages dedicated to courses that will require the use of your ePortfolio. This is one of the things where tagging your journal entries become particularly useful, as it is currently the only way for you to segregate them according to courses or subjects.

Important Things to Note Compared to popular social networking sites many of you frequent, managing and displaying content is not as straightforward. This is by design and is not a system flaw.

Preparing Pages There are a number of ways for presenting your artefacts and pages. For formal UPOU students, it is usually a good idea to create course-specific pages. However, for eSMP, or any other course under MODeL, such a manner of arrangement may hold little meaning. And as an ePortfolio is a means for you to market yourself, so to speak, you can also create pages as you would personally want or even upload content outside course requirements if you believe it adds value to your professional profile. Unless instructed otherwise, you will have great leeway over how you present yourself through your ePortfolio. Sharing Pages It is important to explicitly set the access permission levels for each page you create. Otherwise, all of them will be hidden, by default. You will have several options, but as of this writing, not all of them will be important. By going to Portfolios Shared by me, you will see a list of all the pages and collections you’ve created along with the access level for each. Alternatively, a Share Page tab can be clicked from the page edit window. By clicking on their corresponding key icons, you will see the different levels available to you. For most purposes, either Public or Registered Users will be fine. However, take the time to learn these different levels as they will become important as you progress through the BAMS program. As of this writing, there are still no formal policies regarding what pages should or should not be shared to the public.

Figure 2. Share settings page

Please take note of this above all other considerations. It will not matter how well you built your pages if nobody else can see them. By no means are your teachers obligated to accept whatever excuses you have if they end up seeing this message upon attempting to look at your ePortfolio:

Figure 3. What people see if you do not share your pages with them.

Secret URLs

It is possible to allow people access to your pages even if you properly configure their share settings. This can be achieved through the use of a secret URL. There may be certain requirements where an artefact or a page needs to be accessible only to the faculty, at least at the beginning. Making a secret URL available would be a good way to comply.

RSS Feeds

The system supports RSS Feeds. This might be important for those who run their own blogs and would rather use that for their courses rather than the built-in journal feature. However, while not very likely, there is still that possibility that RSS Feeds might end up being unreliable. RSS Feeds needs to be constantly updated by the system and sometimes, it might not happen. That leaves your feed not including newer entries from the source. I would rather not go into the technical details of this matter. But suffice to say that it would be safer to use the journal feature of this system. Or at least, just copy and paste the actual content to and from your personal blog.

External vs. Directly Uploaded Media Each account is given a certain amount of disk space for you to use as you wish (within reason, of course). However, sooner or later, you will realize that it is by no means a lot. Therefore, you need to wisely choose what to upload and where to upload them. It is recommended to have large media, such as videos and media-heavy slide presentations, hosted elsewhere and then embedded to your pages. Depending on your source, the external artefact can be linked via URL, an embed code with iframe tags or an RSS feed. Mahara currently supports a number of sources, such as Youtube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Prezi and SlideShare. Feedback Under normal circumstances, make sure that you allow other people to comment on your work. According to the Mahara manual, you can have the option to do so this through the following:

• Files – when editing a file. • Journal entries – when editing a journal entry. • Notes – when editing a note. • Pages – in the advanced options.

Remember, feedback is important. Aside from being a means of communication with your fellow BAMS students and faculty, it is a potential source if information for the continued refinement of your ePortfolio.

Problems? If you encounter any difficulties, technical issues or bugs within the system, the first thing for you to do is read the Mahara manual. If it does not address your specific concern, that is when you let your tutor or faculty-in-charge know. If they cannot help you, they will either direct you or forward your concern to someone who can. Alternatively, other means of helping out will soon be established within the site, so stay tuned for them.

Agreements In the interest of transparency, there are a number of things I would like you to be aware of when using the UPOU ePortfolio site.

1. Like all other Web services of the university, use of this site is governed by the UP Acceptable Use Policy (http://upd.edu.ph/aup), which we are all mandated to follow and respect.

2. Understand that anything you upload and post in your ePortfolio must be subject to a Creative Commons license (Non-Commercial ShareAlike 4.0 by default). Therefore, it is imperative for you to start educating yourselves regarding Creative Commons and the its different licenses, starting with their website at www.creativecommons.org.

3. This site is packaged as an open educational resource, meaning practically all content can be used and re-used by other people as long as they work within the bounds of whatever Creative Commons licenses are invoked.

4. This site is also meant to be a springboard for other research and projects sanctioned by the university, by being part of this website, you and your work can be possible sources of data. However, aside from the CC license, actual identities and personal information will be respected and kept confidential at all times unless you explicitly give researchers permission to do otherwise.

Revision history: 0.1 – first draft 0.2 – added info on signing up and sharing portfolio pages 0.3 – added Important Things to Note section; updated Mahara manual link to direct to latest version