Making potential customers / audience aware of the product and convincing them of the value.
At many points, the project teams have had to clearly articulate the rationale for the use of eportfolios. The benefits have been argued and researched for many years around the world, but students and faculty are generally unaware of why eportfolios can be so valuable.
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.
The effort to make students aware of the service, create, and use their eportfolios can justifiably be called marketing. It is an ongoing effort to maximize student use of the ubcarts service.
We would like to report fine-grained statistics on user adoption and use. What we have right now is users' site creation date and total number of Learning Activity posts as they accumulated over time.
The TLEF project culminated in a conference hosted at UBC and organized by the project team. It explored ePortfolios from many perspectives. Participants discussed digital portfolio modalities, how to deploy them in programs and courses, and how to bring more faculty and programs into the fold.