Desire2Pod Cast 16: D2L ePortfolio

This is a recording of a phone interview I conducted with Deb Homuth, principal of the Ontario Virtual High School in Canada. Deb was a consultant/advisor for the D2L development team while they were designing and building their ePortfolio tool. It's about 16 minutes long.


From their March 13 press release: "Desire2Learn Inc., today unveils ePortolio, a much anticipated new product that enables users to track, record, and reflect upon their progress from K-12, to post-secondary education and beyond. An ePortfolio is a digital repository of artifacts that demonstrates progress and achievement. Pairing social networking and informal learning with the traditional classroom, Desire2Learn ePortfolio provides users and institutions with a customized and personalized learning journey."

Personalized Learning: "Today’s users demand a personalized learning experience that extends beyond the traditional classroom boundaries to include social networks of peers, evaluators, and even external experts. ePortfolio uses Web 2.0 standard interface components such as a dashboard, tagging, and inline help to engage users. Desire2Learn ePortfolio also allows users to control what goes into their portfolio, how items are organized, and when items are organized and presented. The user’s ability to publish anything within the ePortfolio creates a complete view of their learning journey. Assessments and comments using rubrics can be applied to any of the diverse artifacts, reflections, presentations, and collections within the ePortfolio to provide a comprehensive perspective of the learning journey."

Another podcast about the ePortfolio tool will be recorded tomorrow with Kenneth Chapman, lead developer at D2L.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed2Go is NOT Higher Education

Image
For several years now I have railed against the use of ed2go courses when they are affiliated with a college or university. During my time on the Minnesota Online Council I was especially adamant against the listing of the ed2go courses at the MnOnline website as though they were endorsed courses from a member institution. There is no way that I think the brand should be diluted by including courses like this in our offerings. Why not? Glad you asked. NOTE: most of this post was written after I discovered that my own school had recently signed on with ed2go. This saddens me to no end since I spent the past five y ears railing against the use of ed2go in Minnesota Online and our colleges. Our VP in that division assures me that they will do what they can to not harm our reputation for quality online offerings - and I believe that, I'm just not sure how much of that we can actually control. I waited a couple of weeks before posting this to see whether my opinion would be changed by
Read more

Another Switch from Blackboard to Desire2Learn

Image
As many of you know, I am always interested in the comings and goings of the LMS wars. Who's leaving Blackboard and what are they going to? I rarely have to ask the opposite question - who's migrating to Blackboard from a non-Blackboard platform - because it almost NEVER happens. The latest one to catch my eye was the University of Surrey in the UK. Here's their press release about choosing D2L . Nowhere in the release do they mention what platform they've been on - but it doesn't take much effort to find this on their current website: So, yes, this is another school switching from Blackbeard to Desire2Learn. I find portions of their press release to be revealing about their previous experience with BlackCT Vista. "A new hi-tech system is being introduced at the University of Surrey to enable students to learn on computers and mobile devices via a more personalised platform ." "The new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), replacing and vastly improving
Read more

New Netiquette Guidelines for LSC Online

The LSC Online Programs Advisory Committee decided to craft a set of netiquette guidelines that would serve as the recommended list that faculty could use for their online courses. It's not a full policy or anything like that, just an attempt to give them some useful information to post in their online courses. Faculty are free to use them, change them, add to them, not use them at all, or whatever. The list is posted in the LSC wiki . This project was taken on because many of our online faculty had been using a particular web resource for many years as a netiquette guide. That web page began carrying less-than-attractive banner ads and quite frankly was always more about general online netiquette rather than focused on online learning. There are quite a few other sets of guidelines out there, but many of them are rather lengthy or include items that we don't feel are needed, and occasionally we just disagreed with them. So, we decided to write a relatively short list of our ow
Read more