The life and times of LUSID

Janet Strivens

Centre for Lifelong Learning

The University of Liverpool

The early 90’s• Enterprise in Higher Education Initiative (funded by

the Employment Department)

“all students at Liverpool will have a Record of Achievement”

• Portfolio Thinking: Occupational Therapy,

Earth Sciences, the Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching…

• EHE lessons: Successful practice local, departmentally-based, responding to own culture and requirements, using own vocabulary

Development of a web-based tool

• Funded by Government Office on Merseyside/ DfEE Recording Achievement Programme

• Driving ideas:

- Independent of departmental support (or lack of it);

- Supporting students in a reflective process;

- Helping students analyse their experiences, identify their generic skills, develop them further, evidence them to employers;

- Supporting target setting and action planning processes.

LUSID: a first-generation PDP tool

• Liverpool University Student Interactive Database• http://lusid.liv.ac.uk• Originated 1996: web front end, relational

database, programmed in Java• Sections:

- recording (experiences and achievements)- skills audit- action planning (activities and goals)- reporting

Post Dearing (1997) developments

• Recording achievement progress files in schools/personal development planning in HE

• Emphasis on role of tutor/mentor/careers adviser/life coach

• Importance of generic skills enshrined in HE Subject benchmarks BUT completely uncontrolled vocabulary

• Dawning awareness of the interoperability dimension

The current LUSID system

What does LUSID do well?• induces learner to generate records• builds reflection into these records through

structured questions• re-presents existing records to learner at appropriate

points• allows easy customisation of pages for different

purposes/audiences• offers structure and guidance customised to user (at

least by programme/department)• draws and returns data from student record system

What does LUSID do badly or not at all?

• Does not store digital artefacts

• Does not allow multiple access to records with owner’s permission

• Does not format (very well) records for presentational purposes

• Does not (yet) talk to the VLE

• Doesn’t try to be much fun to use

New directions• Web Services for Reflective Learning (WS4RL)

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=ws4rlThe WS4RL project is defining and prototyping a second-generation standards-based PDP web service, from whose architecture emerges the concept of PIADS, a personal information aggregation and distribution service, which could be central to future e-portfolios.

• Skills Profiling for Web Services (SPWS) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=deletspws

The SPWS project is taking up the challenge of defining frameworks for skills to be used in PDP and with e-portfolios.

In the future…

• Going open source

• Link to Blackboard’s Content Management and E-portfolio software (?and other e-portfolios?)

• Change the entire look and feel……