eFolioWorld Resource

If you missed the eFolioWorld webinar session, you can access it here.  (Thanks to ePortfolio California for making this available.)

Developer/Company Name: Minnesota State Colleges and Universities/University of Minnesota/Avenet Web Solutions

URL: efolioworld.com

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The following questions are a compilation of the questions and concerns identified in an informal polling of eportfolio community members during spring 2011. The answers are the vendor's responses.

What vision or understanding of learning informed the design of your tool?

We developed eFolio as a user-centered application for students, teachers and workers, to be wholly owned and controlled by the user as a lifelong, lifewide learning portfolio.  Learning cannot be isolated to one event but results from a collection of experiences that gain meaning over time and through the learner's reflective process. The portfolio process allows this to occur when it lives within the curriculum or is valued independently by the user. We view eFolio as THE way to best observe and evaluate learning outcomes.

How does your vision of learning promote a student-centeredapproach to education? (e.g. student ownership of his/her learning)

The tool was constructed from the outset with user ownership as a core value. The learner is called to purposeful reflection.  They must select those items that best highlight their learning growth and experience and clearly connect why it is important within the collection of their evidence. Recent additions of administrative aides, such as sponsor and evaluation tools, have not diluted this user centric model.

Does your tool allow students to control permissions? Can they share with people outside of the institution? How? (e.g., advisor, prospective employer, etc.).

Users control access to the portfolio content. Users can share their content privately or publicly and can construct unique views of discrete subsets of content at their discretion.

What is the process for inviting feedback on work or artifacts?

Users can request feedback on any individual artifactat their discretion. Feedback can be in the form of Likertscale, question-answer, free-form text or editorial with permissions.

Describe how your tool promotes and supports student-to-student collaboration.

Users can utilize any of the feedback mechanisms or they can share any specific site view with other users at their discretion or as directed by faculty.

Describe how your tool promotes and supports student-to-faculty collaboration.

Again, users can utilize any of the feedback mechanisms or share a specific site view with educators. In addition, eFolio services, such as profiles and questionnaires, provide guided interactions between faculty and students.

How does your tool support and encourage the reflection process for students and faculty?

At the individual item level, the tool encourages and supports the reflection process. Also, users can include multiple reflections over time. The ability to capture reflections has always been a core feature of eFolio.

How does your tool address and support institutional level assessment needs (e.g., aggregating student data and generating reports for accreditation)?

Through institutional-level tools, sponsors can structure, query and evaluate individual user data and generate aggregate reports.

Does your application integrate with enterprise systems? Which ones? Do you have examples of effective integration in support of advising or other student services you can share?

We have not yet been requested to construct an interface with a Student Information System. We have integrated with other enterprise tools, however, such as Moodle and Shibboleth. We would be pleased to offer integration with other information systems or electronic student services as required.

What is the main strength of your application?

A core strength of eFolio is its ability to support and empower a diverse set of users with a lifelong and lifewide portfolio solution while simultaneously providing tools to support institutional and educator needs to demonstrate user learning outcomes.  That items can be added over time, combined in various views for audience emphasis or tagged for efficiency of collecting related items into one aggregate object, eFolio supports the lifewide functionality of one's content.

What weaknesses have been identified relative to the user experience and shared with you?

The current release of the tool does not provide as much design/layout flexibility as some users would like. Also, adding content involves a two-step process that some users find cumbersome and less intuitive than they would like. We expect to address these concerns in future releases.

Please share some examples of user feedback.

We have received extremely positive user feedback, especially from attendees at our annual eFolio Summit events. Links to these examples are at www.efolioworld.com.

Please share examples of the successful use of your application to help students achieve their goals undefined admission to graduate school, career placement and advancement, etc.

We have received testimonials from many users. One recent example of how the tool has been utilized by students can be viewed at http://stlouispark.patch.com/articles/two-st-louis-park-teachers-offer-vision-of-21st-century-classroom

What key changes or features do you plan to introduce in the near future?

We expect to offer enhanced design features, better iPad integration, an assessment dashboard, and other evaluation tools and services in upcoming product releases.

Technical Information

System Requirements End User: The eFolio system is a hosted web service. The user simply needs to have access to a web-browser enabled device to use eFolio. It supports current and legacy browsers.

System Requirements Server: N/A

Hosted service?  The eFolio system is a hosted software service.  For very large implementations, self hosted solutions are available as negotiated.

Storage Capacity (per account): Currently, the standard internal storage capacity is 50MB, although this limit is negotiable. Other stored content can be easily embedded within or linked to an eFolio.

Privacy policy relative to student accounts and underage users: We comply with all relevant state and federal privacy and data practices rules required by sponsors. Underage user sites are defaulted to private and cannot be made public. All other users have complete control over privacy settings for each artifact in their portfolio. In addition, there are opt-in/opt-out procedures for users participating in data sharing with faculty seeking to evaluate portfolio content.

Standards compliance: eFolio is IMS eportfolio compliant. We are following the emerging portfolios standards activity and will maintain compliance with any nationally and internationally adopted standards.

Section 508 compliance: eFolio is Section 508 compliant. Web accessibility has been a core concern throughout our develoment history.

Published API: We do not have a published API for eFolio, but we are pleased to work with any entity seeking to integrate with eFolio. We were the first portfolio to achieve IMS eportfolio standard compliance.

Migration/Exportation: Users can import/export content under IMS eportfolio standards.

Systems Integration (list known): Moodle, Shibboleth

Accepted artifacts/media (pictures, video, audio, text, html, documents, etc.): ALL

Business Operations

Company profile:Avenet Web Solutions is a privately held Minnesota-based technology company founded in 1999. We have several thousand clients, including more than 1400 local government clients nationwide. Avenet has been the technology solution partner for eFolio since its creation in 2001.

Customer base/size: Historically, eFolio has served over 200,000 users. The current active user base of eFolioMinnesota is more than 60,000, and the curent eFolioWorld user base is more than 34,000. We provide portfolios at more than 100 education institutions in the US.

Student license pricing model: Prices are based on a sliding scale, depending on numbers of users, and range from $15 to $4 per user.

Institutional pricing model: Current Institutional module pricing ranges from $1500 to $5000 per module. Additional services, including integration and consulting services, are negotiated on an hourly basis depending on requirements.

Postgraduate/transfer student license model: Users that leave a sponsoring institution can continue their eFolio subscription for a modest annual fee. The current annual fee is $15.

Institution service agreement model: Service agreements, if relevant, are negotiated as needed.

Online support information: See http://efolioworld.custhelp.com

Institutional support services (Free): Certain services (identified in license quote) are provided as included in the license fee. All online help services are provided free of charge.

Institutional support services (Fee-based): Training, consulting and development services are provided at hourly rates as negotiated

IT staffing requirements: No IT staff are required unless integration with other IT services is requested/required.

(9/27/11)