Dissemination
The VaNTH Portal is a web-accessible repository serving as a dissemination vehicle for the VaNTH ERC. It makes classroom-based, outside class, and blended learning materials and experiences designed by VaNTH educators available to the larger bioengieering educational community.
The portal is profile-based. Profiles scaffold learning materials with sets of resources that contribute to their reusability, such as instructor guides and research papers that report on instructional designs and assessments of efficacy. Each profile is classified with a set of metadata that describes such things as educational level, development status, and delivery mode. Profiles provide courseware at varying granularities, from individual modules to entire courses.
Profiles can be created and modified by authors through the web. Workflows support an editorial process that can be tailored to support institutional or domain-based reviewers. Profiles approved by the editorial process are then made available to visitors. Requests to access the learning materials provided by profiles involve making an agreement with the ERC, a process automated by the portal. These requests can be individually tracked by the originating educator through the portal or by e-mail notifications.
The portal complements simple keyword-based searching of courseware profiles with an advanced metadata-based search interface based on the retrieval by reformulation paradigm. This interface helps visitors during the search process by providing feedback on the current state of their search in terms of matching metadata from available profiles. This feedback ensures that metadata-based queries will always match at least one profile on the portal.
The portal is integrated with other VaNTH learning technologies. Resources for adaptive online learning, delivered by an eLMS server, can be directly launched from the portal to support evaluation by visitors of the site. Repository-based CAPE courseware designs can be bundled with online learning resources in profiles, and these designs can be inspected and adapted by educators that install the CAPE authoring environment. CAPE supports publishing profiles to the portal for online learning designs created or adapted by authors. These forms of integration provide much greater capabilites for adaptive reuse than web-based tools that support simple bundling and sequencing.
These and other capabilities of the VaNTH Portal are summarized in the concept map below.
The VaNTH Portal is built on the open source Plone content management system.