Our goal was to build a free service that students could use immediately on arrival at UBC and take with them and use free forever. The foundation of the service design would be that students would recognize this as something that they own, build, and deploy as they wish. We intentionally divorced it from any particular program's use of the service.
The design of the Arts eportfolio service was a balancing act. On one hand, we wanted a system with a low cost of ownership (build and maintain) and sustainable at current resource levels. On the other we knew that students wanted something simple but with modern, appealing design and some flexibility on design elements. We solved this with a highly customized Wordpress multiuser theme, with all the elements labelled appropriately for eportfolios.
Collections enable students to curate and present their activities in different contexts.