Eduportfolio: Complex Platform for

Curriculum Management and Mapping

Matěj Karolyi

1,2

, Jakub Ščavnický

, Vojtěch Bulhart

, Petra Růžičková

and Martin Komenda

Institute of Biostatistics and Analyses, Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Keywords: Curriculum Management System, Web-based Application, Curriculum Development, Curriculum Mapping.

Abstract: A lot of curriculum designers, teachers and faculty managers are involved in a curriculum development at

higher education institutions. It is necessary to optimise this complicated process of curriculum optimisation

and mapping using modern technologies and tools. Therefore, the EDUportfolio platform, which allows users

to comfortably and safely create individual building blocks of the curriculum, is created in accordance with

valid international standards. Our paper presents the origin platform from methodological and technical

perspective. EDUportfolio offers a content creation module, a content browsing module as well as a reporting

module that provides complex overview on created building blocks.

1 INTRODUCTION

The complex use of a wide range of technologies in

learning has attracted much attention from

researchers and educators in the past decade (Hwang

and Wu 2014). Unfortunately, not all innovative

approaches for education improvement are really

effective and usable in practice. The final impact on

students’ learning performance is sometimes unclear

due to many various factors (i.e. low experience in

modern information and communication technologies

(ICT), missing enthusiasm, lack of time and human

resources, insufficient software and hardware

equipment).

Generally speaking, technology-enhanced

learning (TEL) describes the application of ICT to

teaching and learning processes; TEL is even

frequently considered synonymous with equipment

and infrastructure (Kirkwood and Price 2014). In

terms of curriculum management, TEL plays a very

important role in each particular step toward a fully

described and mapped education. Curriculum

development is the very first and probably the most

important step to get a well-balanced curriculum.

Adopting a systematic approach for curriculum

development represents the only way to build

a database which can be subsequently used to make

any further minor or major changes and to redesign

various study programmes. Data describing a

complete set of mandatory and optional courses

should be available in a parametric form, ideally at

the same level of granularity and containing a unified

terminology. This might seem to be a complicated

and almost unachievable issue; with a proper use of

ICT, however, this challenge can be readily

addressed. It was our motivation behind an effort to

design and to implement a robust and modular system

which would be helpful in the time-consuming

process of courses specification. Moreover, its

compliance with proven international technical and

methodological standards and recommendations is

highly appreciated with regard to future unification,

innovation and transformation. It is essential to learn

from the past and to follow advantages of existing

qualifications framework used globally in the sector

of tertiary education.

This paper introduces EDUportfolio, a new

online system for easy curriculum development,

management and mapping, which makes

understanding of various curriculum information

produced and guaranteed by responsible teachers

clear and simpler. This platform defines various

curriculum building blocks including textual

attributes, which are fully in compliance with

international standards, and provides an effective way

to describe individual study programmes, courses and

learning units. Using a set of mandatory parameters,

each curriculum designer is able to specify his/her

lecture or seminar in terms of title, authoring team,

352

Karolyi, M., Š

cavnický, J., Bulhart, V., R˚uži

cková, P. and Komenda, M.

Eduportfolio: Complex Platform for Curriculum Management and Mapping.

DOI: 10.5220/0007722103520358

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2019), pages 352-358

ISBN: 978-989-758-367-4

affiliation, annotation, keywords and, most

importantly, learning outcomes together with the

required assessment form. The user-friendly

graphical interface contains several modules for

creating, browsing, reporting and exporting a given

curriculum. The EDUportfolio platform is designed

as a general tool supporting outcome-based as well as

module-based education, making it possible to

describe any study programme. Design, development

and implementation have been coordinated by the

Faculty of Medicine of the Masaryk University,

where a pilot run of outcome-based curriculum of

General Medicine study programme has been

successfully carried out.

2 METHODS

From the perspective of each institution of higher

education, a comprehensive collection of

requirements on its students (often called

competencies or learning outcomes) after the end of

learning period – typically just before their graduation

– is needed. The main emphasis is focused on the final

product, i.e. what sort of graduates shall be produced,

rather than on the educational process itself (Harden

1999). EDUportfolio supports various kinds of

curricula; one of them – an outcome-based paradigm

followed by the Bloom’s taxonomy as a pilot

experience from Masaryk University – is briefly

described below. There has been limited discussion

on original information technologies supporting

outcome-based ideas. There are only a few available

and published solutions, which have been developed

for making educational outcome-based data

accessible to the target group – students and teachers

(Komenda, 2015). Based on the comparison of

various curriculum management systems (Vaitsis et

al., 2017), which support the complex delivery and

audit of miscellaneous study programmes, a final set

of requirements and core features of EDUportfolio

were defined. EDUportfolio is a kind of standard

compliant system, which covers a complex process of

curriculum building, browsing and interactive

visualisation.

2.1 Bologna Process

This approach is also in accordance with the

European strategy for higher education. One of the

major changes was introduced by the Bologna

Process, which has created the European Higher

http://www.ehea.info/pid34250/members.html

Education Area (EHEA). This comprehensive reform

started in 1999, where the Bologna Declaration was

signed by education ministers from 29 European

countries and important goals were defined. The first

objective was to provide an easily readable and

comparable system of degrees and divide the study

into two-cycle of degrees (undergraduate and

graduate degree). Another important goal was

focused on the establishment of a Europe-wide

system of credits (ECTS – European Credit Transfer

System), which was created to encourage student

mobility (Hansmann et al. 2017). Nowadays, the

Bologna Process has 48 participating countries. Every

two years, there is a meeting of education ministers

where the original agreement is discussed and might

be revised as needed (Collins and Hewer 2014)

EDUportfolio, which is presented in this paper as

a system for easy curriculum development,

management and mapping, has been developed

according to objectives defined by the Bologna

Process; furthermore, it also reflects and respects the

goals of European reforming activities.

2.2 Bloom’s Taxonomy

This Bloom’s taxonomy is a theory of educational

goals defined by Benjamin Bloom, an American

psychologist. It is one of the most important

pedagogical theories influencing the concept of

teaching planning and curriculum development.

Benjamin S. Bloom was the head of a group of

educational psychologists which, in 1956, published

a study called „Taxonomy of Educational Objectives:

The Classification of Educational Goals. Handbook I:

Cognitive Domain“ (Krathwohl 2002). The original

publications contain carefully developed definitions

for each of the six categories in the cognitive domain.

These cognitive skills range from simple levels to

more complex ones. The categories are:

(1) knowledge, (2) comprehension, (3) application,

(4) analysis, (5) synthesis and (6) evaluation.

Individual levels are linked to each other; it is

therefore necessary to master a simpler category

before continuing with a next one, which requires

deeper learning and is more complex (Krathwohl

2002, Adams 2015). The Bloom’s taxonomy can be

used by professionals to write learning outcomes that

describe skills and abilities; these competencies are

subsequently required from learners to master and to

demonstrate. Among others, the so-called action

verbs are very useful; there are lists of action verbs

(Adams 2015) that are appropriate for learning

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outcomes at each level of the Bloom’s taxonomy.

Lists of these action verbs are widely available on the

Internet.

EDUportfolio supports an outcome-based

curriculum which represents a measurable

description of what students are able to demonstrate

in terms of knowledge, skills and values. A learning

outcome always consists of a noun, a verb and

a sentence (see Figure 1). There are three categories

of learning outcomes supported by EDUportfolio that

reflect the level in which learning outcomes are

defined based on the MedBiquitous Competency

Framework

: (1) the programme level (e.g. “this

particular programme instils the following

competencies...”), (2) the sequence-block level (e.g.

“by the end of this particular course, you will be able

to...”), and (3) the event level (e.g. “by the end of this

particular lecture/seminar, you will be able to...”).

2.3 Pilot Usage in Partner’s

Universities

After the implementation of the core functionalities

of EDUportfolio was deployed in the pilot version to

the public servers. There is accessible to our key

partners of a the BCIME project (Building

Curriculum Infrastructure in Medical Education)

from Central and Eastern European region (Germany,

Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Romania).

Each of involved academic institutions support

different way of delivery and audit of medical and

healthcare study programmes. During three years,

partners plan to map and optimise one common

preclinical study discipline together with five

different medical disciplines to prove modernizing

effects as well as practical application of the

EDUportfolio platform. Because of the opened and

modular architecture of the platform’s framework, the

duplicities in curricula can be detected and minimized

wherever needed and the missing components and

learning units can be easily identified. In this pilot

approach users are able to see initial curriculum

description based on the real content of the General

Medicine study programme created by Masaryk

University.

2.4 Medical Curriculum Guidebook

One of valuable outputs of the project from the

methodological perspective is Medical curriculum

guidebook

. This online handbook describes the

crucial steps in the curriculum development process.

It also explains basic vocabulary connected to the

description of the curriculum according to the

MedBiquitous standards. Thanks to this material is

curriculum developer able to obtain knowledge

necessary for work with the platform and create

meaningful content.

2.5 Technological Background

The platform has been built using standard web

technologies on which some of our previous web

portals had been built (e.g. the MEDCIN platform and

the CCCN Pilot Model Dataviewer) (Komenda et al.

2015, Dušek et al. 2017, Ščavnický et al. 2018). The

main difference is that in this project we use the latest

(December 2018) Symfony framework in version 4.2

created by SensioLabs

2.5.1 Roles of Users

The user role is an important attribute of each

authenticated user in the platform. Immediately after

the authentication process, the authorisation process

takes place and at least one user role is assigned to the

user. Assignment depends on enrolment within the

university environment. In some cases, roles are

Figure 1: An example of learning outcome definition (e. g. Student describes the anatomy of human body).

https://medbiquitous.org/curriculum_inventory

https://eduportfolio.iba.muni.cz/about-project/

https://sensiolabs.com/

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assigned automatically (for instance students’ roles),

whereas other roles must be explicitly assigned based

on university management decisions (such as the role

of content guarantee). The set of user roles can be

expanded as needed. In the case of new specialised

modules, functionality can be accessed either to

existing user roles or to newly created roles. There are

currently four user roles in EDUportfolio:

 Administrator: Users in this role are tasked

with managing users (creating accounts,

activating accounts, assigning roles based on

management decisions, and eventually

deleting inactive users), and managing high-

level building blocks of curriculum – study

programmes, medical disciplines and

courses. Continuous checking of platform

run and work with the reporting module can

be a secondary activity.

 Teacher: Teachers can examine the

curriculum in the system. Structure of

courses, teaching units, and other building

blocks helps them in the overall orientation

in teaching and in the identification of its

shortcomings.

 Curriculum Designer: A user with this role

can create and modify building blocks at the

lowest level – learning units and learning

outcomes (competencies). Learning units

and learning outcomes are the most

numerous groups of building elements and

a wider group of workers at the university /

faculty is traditionally involved in the

process of their creation. They can then look

at teaching units created by other teachers

and use somebody else’s learning outcomes

in their units.

 Student: Students represent the last and the

largest group of users. Using a curriculum

browser, they are able to view details of

learning units that were created by their

teachers. Information about the student’s

grade is contained in the system and, based

on the recommended passage through

studies, students will be advised about

content that is relevant to them. The

student’s identity is obtained from the

Masaryk University Information System

which serves as a verification authority

Figure 2: Overview of the General Medicine study programme.

https://is.muni.cz/

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3 RESULTS

The EDUportfolio platform serves as a robust tool

for easy curriculum development and management

for higher education institutions, which consists of

several modules. Each of them combines

functionality related to similar issues (content

development, content browsing, reporting, etc.). At

the same time, the modules are accessed or slightly

modified depending on the logged user’s role in the

system. The platform offers the ability to assign

multiple roles to one user. In any case, the user is

only allowed to use those modules that are

appropriate to his/her assigned roles. The platform

has three core modules: (i) a curriculum

development module for the creation of all building

blocks, (ii) a curriculum browsing module for

viewing already created learning units and their

environment, and (iii) a curriculum reporting

module, which shows aggregated statistics about

designed teaching.

3.1 Curriculum Development Module

This module allows users with the roles of teacher-

designer or administrator to view and edit the

content of the curriculum. Views for the

modification of all building blocks of the curriculum

are available: study programmes, medical

disciplines, courses, learning units and learning

outcomes. Using interactive web forms (see Figure

3), users conveniently fill all the necessary

information for individual blocks and link them

together. For some blocks, it is possible to determine

whether the block is already finished or whether it is

only a draft. Visualisation by a bar chart provides an

overview of the entire study programme (see Figure

2), making it possible to see its size determined by

the number of linked building blocks.

3.2 Curriculum Browsing Module

As a basic functionality, a search module above an

existing curriculum is available to all logged-in

users. After entering a phrase, the user can find

relevant results in the form of details of

corresponding teaching units. The search engine

uses power of Majka and morphological analysis

described in our previous paper (Karolyi, Ščavnický

and Komenda, 2018). A set of interactive filters (see

Figure 4) allows the user to select the results more

accurately.

The results are returned according to the

relevance of a given search phrase from the most to

the least appropriate. The search itself uses several

attributes of the learning unit itself, as well as other

building blocks to which it is linked. In the future,

support for recommending relevant content is also

planned, based on user-specific information.

Figure 3: Editing form for a learning unit (view for mobile

devices).

3.3 Curriculum Reporting Module

Curriculum reporting is a standalone module that

allows users to examine aggregated statistics about

teaching. This module consists of two interactive

parts: (i) a filter panel and (ii) a visualisation window.

Visualisation via bar chart (see Figure 5) represents

Overview of learning outcomes’ assessment forms

for specific data. The filter panel allows users to filter

input data based on the chosen study programme,

section, semester and decide whether to show or hide

categories with no values. It is also possible to reset

all previously set filters using the “reset filters”

button. The visualisation itself is a horizontal

multibar chart that is built using the nvd3 JavaScript

library for interactive web visualisations

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Figure 4: Results of the curriculum browser after entering

the search phrase “bones”.

This chart allows users to change between

grouped or stacked type of bars. Moreover, users can

switch on/off particular series using an interactive

legend to the chart. The x-axis represents the number

of unique learning outcomes, while the y-axis

represents each category of assessment form. The

legend determines the number of series, which are

distinguished by different colours. Each bar then

corresponds to a series with a colour specified in the

legend. Tooltips with additional information appear

upon hovering over the bars. The chart in Figure 5

may be interpreted as follows. In the General

Medicine study programme, there are no learning

outcomes at the course level in any assessment form.

However, at the learning unit level, the most frequent

assessment forms are the Combined form (continuing

test, practical exam, final exam), the Oral discussion-

based exam, the Final exam – oral and the Practical

exam (demonstration of skills).

3.4 Conclusions

For students, EDUportfolio provides a summary in

terms of knowledge to be obtained over the study and

topics to be covered repeatedly. Curriculum

designers, teachers and guarantors can clearly

describe their lessons and browse curriculum data of

all available courses. Faculty management obtains an

online transparent overview of curriculum together

with clear information about overlapping areas. In

general, EDUportfolio serves as a decision support

system for standard-compliant curriculum

development, innovation and redesign.

We got rich feedback based on the pilot usage of

EDUportfolio by partner universities. Curriculum

designers, teachers and faculty management tried to

get oriented in the presented graphical user interface

and give us tips for the improvement. Many of them

was approved and implemented to the platform.

Currently we plan to release the EDUportfolio

platform for the wider audience and continue in

development of enhancing features.

Figure 5: Overview of assessment forms of learning outcomes: Interactive report.

Eduportfolio: Complex Platform for Curriculum Management and Mapping

357

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors have been supporting by the following

projects: (i) Masaryk University Strategic

Investments in Education SIMU+

(CZ.02.2.67/0.0/0.0/16_016/0002416) funded from

the European Regional Development Fund, (ii)

Masaryk University 4.0

(CZ.02.2.67/0.0/0.0/16_015/0002418) funded from

the European Social Fund, (iii) BCIME – Building

Curriculum Infrastructure in Medical Education –

reg. no.: 2018-1-SK01-KA203-046318, which is

funded by the European Commission ERASMUS+

program

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