Using an eBook for an accreditation portfolio

I first started this small website as a guide to using eBooks to produce "Accreditation Portfolios".

If you've arrived on this page wondering what all this is about, let me explain..

What is an "accreditation portfolio"?

Increasingly, qualifications are being gained not only by formal exam, but also by the submission of evidence that the candidate is competent in his or her field. This evidence is usually a series of paper documents which substantiate competence against a series of criteria. The candidate takes each criterion (often referred to as "PCs" or Performance Criteria) and points the Assessor to the document which provides evidence of competence. This is an "accreditation portfolio".

When I had to produce an accreditation portfolio to prove competence as a "Technology Means Business" ("TMB") Advisor, I thought that producing the portfolio electronically would make it easier both for myself and, even more importantly, for the Assessor. It proved a success, and attracted a lot of interest. So I thought that I would share my experience and help others who are going through a similar accreditation process, whether it is TMB or any other type of accreditation or competence-based assessment, such as NVQs.

The benefits of an electronic portfolio

• It makes it easy for the Assessor rapidly to jump from the Performance Criterion to the appropriate evidence, using hypertext links
• Evidence can easily and quickly be added to the portfolio - a lot of evidence is in electronic format already.
• The portfolio can be stored and transmitted electronically. It can be emailed to the Assessor. It can be stored on a floppy disk or CD ROM (my own portfolio, which had over 30 evidence documents, fitted easily on a 1.4 Mb floppy disk)
• It's cool!

How to produce an electronic portfolio

The principles are the same as for producing any other type of eBook - you should have read the pages on Preparing and Compiling & Testing before reading the rest of this page. In addition to producing HTML pages, there are the following elements which you should take account of when designing and building your eBook portfolio.

I'm going to use my own TMB portfolio as an example (clients' names have been obscured for confidentiality), but the same principles should apply to almost any type of portfolio - such as an NVQ portfolio for example. But always read your accreditation guidelines carefully!

The software that I used was Macromedia's Dreamweaver for producing the web pages that made up the portfolio and Activ eBook for compiling the eBook. See the Software page for my comments on this excellent package, and the Compiling & Testing page for some screenshots of Activ eBook in action. My preferred graphics package is Paintshop Pro (this is an Amazon.com link - price around $US 80), or about £80 + VAT from Digital Workshop in the UK.

The elements of a portfolio

It will normally contain:

An introduction Here, you may be obliged to include some personal details, such as your CV. But you should also include some instructions to the Assessor on how to use your portfolio..

Summary Sheets for each of the Units in your portfolio, Elements within each Unit, and Personal Competencies within each Element. The PCs should repeat word for word what is in the accreditation document given to you, should describe the circumstances under which you met that PC, and should hypertext link to the specific piece in the document which proves your competence..

Evidence Documents These should be clearly marked, pointing to the part of the document which proves your competence, and clearly labels the Unit, Element and PC to which it refers. Often, one document will be used as evidence for more than one PC. It is then useful to colour code both the reference in the Summary Sheet (as shown above) and the label on the Evidence Document..

The Navigation System in your portfolio should allow the reader rapidly to return to the page from which they clicked through to the Evidence Document. How this can be done with multiple references in an Evidence Document I'll explain in this next section...

Tips and Tricks

These should save you going through some of the learning curve that I experienced!

• Use fixed width tables throughout your portfolio. This means that you retain absolute control over the layout of your documents. This is particularly important if you are going to use "layers" (see below) to label your Evidence Documents. I set all of my documents in a main table 700 pixels wide. This is viewable in an 800 x 600 pixel window (the most common size) without sideways scrolling.
• Mark the point in your Evidence Document that you want the reader to go to with an "anchor" label. This is an invisible bookmark on a page that you give a name to, such as "first-item". Most web authoring packages support this feature. When you hypertext link to this anchor in, say, "page1.htm", your link should be to "page1.htm#first-item".
• I used "layers" to put labels on my Evidence Documents. These are floating panels that you can position anywhere on your page with precision, irrespective of the other contents on the page. If you set your Evidence Page content in a fixed width table, as recommended above, your layers should be in the same place on the screen relative to the rest of the text, no matter what size window your reader is using. Layers are a very easy to implement with the Dreamweaver web authoring software. Cheaper packages may not support this feature. You could mark up your original documents (say, "Insert Text Field" in MS Word), but it's not so easy to change. Or you could very simply put the label in a little coloured table next to the relevant paragraph. But whatever you do, make sure that you mark up your Evidence Documents clearly, so that the Assessor knows which PC you are trying to prove.
• Use the "go back" Javascript function to allow the reader to return to the previous document that was being used. Don't panic - this is easy to use! Let me illustrate . This panel on an Evidence Document has a little clickable "Back" graphic. Now you could put an absolute document reference on this to return to a specific page, such as "unit-1.htm". But if there is more than 1 label on a page, the reader may click on the wrong Back Button. So what you do is, instead of putting an absolute reference in the clickable image, you simply insert: "javascript:history.back()". You put this on every Back Button, so copying and pasting makes it very easy to insert these layers. It also makes it a lot simpler for the Assessor, as they are not only returned to the same page that they were viewing, but the same part of the page.
• Keep your images small Mostly, the little buttons and such like won't take up much file space. But if you are using scanned documents for evidence, try to reduce the file size without losing too much quality. I used an inexpensive (free to try) little program called JPEG Optimiser from Xat.com. This can really shrink the file size of JPEG images (they also have a program that shrinks GIF files as well). The file size of your portfolio is important if you are emailing it, or if you are trying to squeeze it on to a floppy disk.

Maybe these tips will help you. I hope so. You may find it a little alien at first, unless you are used to building web pages. But once you get stuck into it, the techniques are not too difficult to master, and you will end up with a highly readable portfolio. And if you make life easy for your Assessor, your portfolio will be viewed more favourably!