1. 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

2. 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

3. The Constituents Faculty Candidates Evaluators Faculty Affairs
Legal Affairs
System Administrator

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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)

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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)

10. 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

11. The Front End (Evaluators)
Username: guest Password: l0gin

12. Page Editing and “Dashboard” (Candidates)
Username: candidate1 Password: chapmant3st