The Open Portfolio Challenge: The Big Picture
This fall at Carnegie Mellon University, the Integrative Design, Arts, and Technology program is offering Learning Media Design. Guided by Professor Marti Louw and MakerEd, our team is tasked with the “Open Portfolio Challenge.”
What is an “Open Portfolio”?
A portfolio is a range of tangible projects expressing a student’s interests, learning process, and authentic self. The Open Portfolio Project’s primary goal is making portfolio practices accessible to all students.
The Challenge
While the full documentation of the challenge can be found on Learning Media Design’s course site, the brief summary is as follows:
Create a demo experience of what an open portfolio system could be.
Because of the extremely broad nature of this challenge, we began the process of narrowing our focus with a conceptual map of the current learner’s ecosystem.
Brainstorming: Lifelong Learning Journey
As a team, we created the learner’s ecosystem as we knew it.
Our first attempts at mapping the learner’s ecosystem were messy. Simply, there were so many factors to consider. We had to define what “student” meant to us. Additionally, we had to answer questions like, what are the motivations of the EdTech industry? How do those motivations differ from Educational Foundations? Is the community concerned for the student’s learning potential? Why? Ultimately, we decided on depicting the connection between time and learning. Additionally, we decided to use proximity to display the concern for the student’s well-being verses the concern for the student’s learning potential.
Our concept map placed the student at the top. Family and friends are the first actors to appear before elementary school, continuing onward throughout the student’s learning journey. We placed Academic Institutions and Admissions closer to the stakeholder side of the map, appearing later in the student’s life. Academic Institutions are placed in an interesting position; they are concerned not only about the student’s well-being but also their learning potential and productivity. Our stakeholders are the furthest away from the student, some, like policy makers, are concerned with the student’s learning (and earning) potential and global competitiveness.
As a team, we all gravitated toward the upper half of the Lifelong Learning Journey. We all valued the student/teacher relationship and decided to pursue this relationship further for the challenge. In a final rendition of our concept map, we made sure to emphasize this.
Addressing the Challenge: Our First Design Brief
Our next step was to take what we learned from our concept map and create a design brief to address the challenge. After bouncing ideas back and forth, we realized we shared an interest in creating a digital platform to encourage portfolio making. In a sense, our broad idea was a “Pinterest for Portfolios.”
At a high level, we envisioned a platform that engages all actors in the student’s Lifelong Learning Journey we mapped beforehand. We wanted teachers to structure challenges for students but also allow students to explore on their own. We needed to put this broad concept into words.
We began to draft a design brief that addressed our ideal Open Portfolio platform.
Our brief is as follows:
“We believe that if we build a platform that works across domains and institutions, formal and informal, that allows learners to get feedback from teachers and experts in the field and allows learners to explore different projects and questions based on their interests, and include a process that gives scaffolds and tips for novice users, learners will then be able to understand the value of portfolios and will be more motivated to use these tools throughout their life and actively share with peers, teachers, and employers. Also, as they build their portfolio, reflect and learn from their projects, and better prepare themselves to enter the professional stage.”
Initial Feedback
As anyone could have predicted, our Professor advised us that this design brief was too lofty. As a team, we already knew this as we were writing. Our next challenge will be further narrowing down our target student, domain, and institution, while maintaining our excited vision for an open portfolio platform. My next blog post will detail our team’s specification process and our further explorations in tackling the Open Portfolio challenge.
