Eduportfolio: Complex Platform for
Curriculum Management and Mapping
Matěj Karolyi
1,2
, Jakub Ščavnický
1
, Vojtěch Bulhart
1
, Petra Růžičková
1
and Martin Komenda
1
1
Institute of Biostatistics and Analyses, Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
2
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
ˇ
cavnický, J., Bulhart, V., R˚uži
ˇ
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
Copyright
c
2019 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
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 Blooms 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
1
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)
1
.
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 Blooms Taxonomy
This Blooms 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 Blooms 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
Eduportfolio: Complex Platform for Curriculum Management and Mapping
353
outcomes at each level of the Blooms 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
2
: (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
3
. 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
4
.
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).
2
https://medbiquitous.org/curriculum_inventory
3
https://eduportfolio.iba.muni.cz/about-project/
4
https://sensiolabs.com/
CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education
354
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
students identity is obtained from the
Masaryk University Information System
5
,
which serves as a verification authority
Figure 2: Overview of the General Medicine study programme.
5
https://is.muni.cz/
Eduportfolio: Complex Platform for Curriculum Management and Mapping
355
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
CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education
356
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
REFERENCES
Adams, N. E. (2015) ‘Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive
learning objectives’, Journal of the Medical Library
Association : JMLA, 103(3), pp. 152153. doi:
10.3163/1536-5050.103.3.010.
Collins, S. and Hewer, I. (2014) ‘The impact of the Bologna
process on nursing higher education in Europe: A
review’, International Journal of Nursing Studies,
51(1), pp. 150156. doi: 10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2013.07.
005.
Dušek, L. et al. (2017) ‘A Pilot Interactive Data Viewer for
Cancer Screening’, in Hřebíček, J. et al. (eds)
Environmental Software Systems. Computer Science
for Environmental Protection. Cham: Springer
International Publishing, pp. 173183. doi: 10.1007/
978-3-319-89935-0_15.
Hansmann, R. et al. (2017) ‘How the Bologna reform
influenced learning outcomes: analysis of perceived
qualifications and professional requirements of
environmental sciences graduates’, Studies in Higher
Education, 0(0), pp. 119. doi: 10.1080/030750
79.2017.1405255.
Harden, R. M. (1999) ‘AMEE Guide No. 14: Outcome-
based education: Part 1-An introduction to outcome-
based education’, Medical teacher, 21(1), pp. 714.
Hwang, G. J. and Wu, P. H. (2014) ‘Applications, impacts
and trends of mobile technology-enhanced learning: a
review of 2008-2012 publications in selected SSCI
journals’, International Journal of Mobile Learning
and Organisation, 8(2), p. 83. doi: 10.1504/IJMLO.
2014.062346.
Karolyi, M., Ščavnický, J. and Komenda, M. (2018) ‘First
Step Towards Enhancement of Searching Within
Medical Curriculum in Czech Language using
Morphological Analysis’, in. International Conference
on Computer Supported Education, SCITEPRESS, pp.
288293. doi: 10.5220/0006757902880293.
Kirkwood, A. and Price, L. (2014) ‘Technology-enhanced
learning and teaching in higher education: what is
“enhanced” and how do we know? A critical literature
review’, Learning, Media and Technology, 39(1), pp.
636. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2013.770404.
Komenda, M. et al. (2015) ‘Curriculum Mapping with
Academic Analytics in Medical and Healthcare
Education’, PloS one, 10(12). Available at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC46666
63/ (Accessed: 4 January 2016).
Komenda, M. (2015) Towards a Framework for Medical
Curriculum Mapping. Doctoral thesis. Masaryk
University, Faculty of Informatics. Available at:
http://is.muni.cz/th/98951/fi_d/?lang=cs (Accessed: 8
February 2016).
Krathwohl, D. R. (2002) ‘A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy:
An overview’, Theory into practice, 41(4), pp. 212
218.
Ščavnický, J. et al. (2018) ‘Pitfalls in Users’ Evaluation of
Algorithms for Text-Based Similarity Detection in
Medical Education’, in 2018 Federated Conference on
Computer Science and Information Systems (FedCSIS).
2018 Federated Conference on Computer Science and
Information Systems (FedCSIS), pp. 109116.
Vaitsis, C. et al. (2017) ‘Standardization in medical
education: review, collection and selection of standards
to address’, MEFANET Journal, 5(1), pp. 2839.
CSEDU 2019 - 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education
358