An Open Source e-Portfolio Platform for Faculty Review Dr. Mary Litch, Director Academic Technology and Digital Media Chapman University Orange, California February 13, 2013

The Backstory Tenure-track faculty required to submit portfolio for review in years 2, 4 and 6* Until 5 years ago, paper dossiers only Experimented with proprietary, cloud-hosted portfolio software Experimented with allowing faculty to choose their own platform Settled on locally-hosted WordPress multisite and cloud-hosted video -- Year 3 on WP All TT faculty hired after 2008 must use

The Constituents Faculty Candidates Evaluators Faculty Affairs Legal Affairs System Administrator

Constituents: Faculty Candidates Range of comfort levels with technology must be accommodated Editing interface can’t look “scary” yet must allow flexibility of expression to accommodate wide range of disciplines Text in various file formats plus range of media types must be accommodated Reviewed e-portfolio must be private, yet offer easy (optional) copying to public space

Constituents: Evaluators Navigation in e-portfolios must mirror tab structure required in older paper portfolios E-Portfolios must be viewable at home Viewing content must be easy and must work across all OS/browser combos (IE 4, anyone?) Evaluation history must auto-populate appropriate pages (by committee and year) Note: because Legal requires ink signatures on paper, we no longer allow evaluators to upload letters themselves

Constituents: Faculty Affairs Responsible for walking e-portfolio through evaluation process, uploading evaluator letters, and archiving Not IT people; interface can’t be too scary; technology should help decrease errors Must be able to assign (evaluator) permissions by committee membership en masse Must be able to set begin- and end-times for access to implement committee viewing period (all in one sitting)

Constituents: Legal Affairs Litigation surrounding tenure process occurs frequently Platform must be robust and secure Individual faculty e-portfolios must be private Log of viewings by evaluators must be possible Archiving of portfolio as submitted must be possible Archive must be viewable for the “litigation lifespan” -- potentially several decades

Constituents: System Administrator Limited IT support for project, so platform must be plug-and-play and very stable Video storage and transcoding must be easily off-loaded to cloud, with seamless integration with base platform Customizations must be straightforward Large developer community is strongly desired

The Platform Locally-hosted WordPress 3.* multisite Video is cloud-hosted with Bits on the Run, which offers seamless integration with WP Customized roles with distinct permissions: candidate, evaluator, FA (Faculty Affairs) Customized theme with locked pages and navigational structure Full WP Dashboard hidden from non-admin users (both individual sites and site-wide)

The Future Looking for other universities to partner with to continue customization (themes and plugins) and testing Eventual goal: migrate large number of distinct WP plugins into single plugin and range of custom themes create user documentation and support forum make “complete package” available to other universities for local implementation

The Front End (Evaluators) http://portfoliosdev.chapman.edu/janesmith Username: guest Password: l0gin

Page Editing and “Dashboard” (Candidates) http://portfoliosdev.chapman.edu/janesmith Username: candidate1 Password: chapmant3st