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AQA Deputy Director General Andrew Bird
Speaking about the announcement, AQA's Deputy Director General Andrew Bird said: "The interest in e-portfolios is increasing in centres and there is a growing demand for a system that facilitates easy submission of candidates' work.
This is exactly what our system delivers. It is designed to allow 'open access' to centres: regardless of their supplier or method of collection of e-portfolios, they will be able to connect to AQA and upload their candidates' coursework.
AQA is the first awarding body to produce an e-portfolio workflow system and it will deliver many benefits for centres and candidates: it will enable them to use a wider range of materials in their submissions, it will be quicker and easier than printing samples and material to send by post and it will mean that centres always keep the originals of the candidates' work.
It will also deliver some of the same benefits we see with electronic marking - the moderation process will be quicker and more efficient with real time monitoring and checking."
TAG Learning Managing Director Pilar Clourd
Pilar Cloud, Managing Director of TAG said; "We are pleased to have been chosen to partner with AQA on this ground-breaking development in e-portfolio technology. This builds on work we have done with awarding bodies in the past to support e-assessment, e-submission and e-moderation.
TAG is the leading provider of e-portfolio assessment solutions for schools. Users of our own award-winning MAPS e-qualifications system will be able not only to collect and assess student coursework, but also to electronically submit this to AQA as soon as the AQA e-portfolio handling system is available. But we also recognise that centres may have another e-portfolio or learning platform system to manage student coursework. Therefore, the solution that TAG will be developing for AQA will encompass an open standard that any e-portfolio or learning platform provider can adopt to enable seamless electronic submission of coursework from their systems to AQA's e-Portfolio Handling System. We hope this is the catalyst for creating more interoperability of systems in the education sector - certainly, this is a major challenge facing schools today.
In addition, we are developing a tool to enable those schools that do not yet have an e-portfolio or a learning platform system in place to submit their student coursework electronically to AQA."
Timeline
The initial phase of the project will see the system available to schools and colleges by September in a number of components for use in 2008. The extended project will also be trialled under the new system in November later this year with up to 20 centres able to take part.
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