Education

This project* provides the function of an e-portfolio web application to manage the 1700 portfolios that are submitted by first-year writing students (freshman composition) at the end of each semester at Grand Valley State University. Each semester 29 teachers collect over 1700 portfolios from students enrolled in the course. Each portfolio includes three pieces of writing that is 4-10 pages long. Prior to building this application, the portfolios were distributed via faculty mailboxes and offices, graded, returned to the teacher, and then redistributed again for third reads if needed. In short, we were passing around about 35,000 printed sheets of paper at the end of the term each semester. At the end of an academic year, 3,400 students have passed through this course.

This Draft and Portfolio Management System (DPMS) was created to manage this shuffling of portfolios at the end of each semester term and to manage the student drafts that students shared with teachers and other students throughout the semester. The complexity of the project stems largely from the very intricate set of permissions that are needed for viewing and editing content. Furthermore, the students needed to belong to groups or class sections in order for the teacher to be able to manage the work.