Alex Little

Started to have a look at how we can integrate ePortfolio into LD and I think it’s going to prove more difficult than we first thought – especially compared to the QTI integration. The main reason being that ePortfolio is a different type of spec to QTI & LD in that it only specifies how the structure of the data stored – it doesn’t specify any kind of ‘interaction’ commands.

For example, with the QTI spec all we needed to do was take the QTI xml (for a particular question) and add it in to the LD package. With ePortfolio we can’t do this because the ePortfolio xml is user specific, so we can’t load this as a resource into an LD UoL. The only way we’ve thought so far is to come up with our own xml schema for specifying the various commands that could be put into the LD package as an xml file, which can then be parsed by the LD dispatcher/player and can then call the correct function/method of the ePortfolio tool.

The other thing we’ve not yet sorted out is which ePortfolio tool we are going to use. We’ve got a list of various tools, but we need to know which ones have an API, rather than just a gui interface, so that the player can call the tool using either java or web services.