Leap2A business case

Belongs to the Portfolio interoperability projects pages

The overall aim and purpose of LEAP2 can be seen as being to assist the development of the market for e-portfolio tools, information, and related areas, with the intended result of providing a more stable base for lifelong learning, employer engagement, and other areas where e-portfolio tools are useful. Given that e-portfolios are a good means of conveying important parts of the information about an individual's suitability for a range of jobs or courses, the wider adoption of e-portfolio tools, and their interoperability, feeds into the effectiveness of the educational and labour markets, making it more likely that better-suited people will be recruited onto courses and into jobs.

Benefits considered together
A paper drafted by Adam Cooper and Wilbert Kraan on the case for interoperability suggests seven key roles.


 * Reduction of re-keying: cost savings and quality improvement are possible when standards are used alongside good information management principles.
 * Reduced maintenance cost and disruption: ad-hoc system integration is more likely to require a rework when new software releases occur and risks disruption to business continuity in the event of loss of the software developers who were responsible.
 * Durability of data: data formatted to a widely supported standard will remain usable for longer and even less-widely supported open standards will be easier and cheaper to migrate.
 * Avoidance of supplier lock-in.
 * Easier development paths: coupled with a strategic approach to technology change incremental ICT service migration and development of new services is possible
 * A platform for collaboration: standards are a neutral territory for multilateral business relationships, enable a more fluid set of relationships and reduce the risk of backing the wrong horse. E.g. consider a relationship with gradintel.com
 * Whole system economies: shared services without standards are a nonsense.

As one can see, these points range across effectiveness, efficiency and enabling. Due to the fact that the end user is unlikely to pay for e-portfolio services in the present environment, financial benefits from interoperability are likely to be consequential, rather than direct and immediate, but potentially real nevertheless. Applying this to LEAP2, we can distinguish the following points.

JISC and national strategy
The JISC policy context for e-portfolios lists several national strategies that relate to the e-portfolio world. It is very hard to see how any of these can be implemented effectively without either interoperability of systems dealing with e-portfolio information, or the portability of information between them. The requirement for interoperability is not necessarily stated up front, but in each case it is possible to think through the implications of the strategy in practice, and recognise some way in which the kind of features facilitated by LEAP2 would aid the practical application of the policies.

Being able to transfer information
LEAP2 enables learners to transfer information from old portfolio systems to new ones. Otherwise, they would at best have to copy and paste the information, which both would be time consuming (dependent on the amount of information) and would be a potential source of error. The time and effort involved in manual transfer may easily lead to frustration and a negative view of the processes associated with the portfolio systems.

Being able to interact with several systems
Where several systems hold information relevant to a learner, LEAP2 can facilitate its synchronous sharing, thus enabling the use of information in different systems. This again could save very substantial time for the learner, and is even more likely to be a deciding factor in whether such facilities are used at all.

Migration
LEAP2 makes it possible to migrate from one portfolio system to another without having to go to the possibly large expense of having a bespoke data migration solution. In practice, this may effectively reduce lock-in and open up positive competition between suppliers of e-portfolio and related systems.

Data integration
Where systems can interoperate with LEAP2, it become feasible to reduce duplication of information, e.g. between an e-portfolio system and a student record system. This is likely to have significant benefits in terms of accuracy of the information held and its timely updating.

Initialisation learner information in new systems
Similarly, information can be drawn from existing systems to populate a new system. For example, a new system supporting the HEAR could take information from an existing e-portfolio system, or vice versa.

Re-use
System suppliers adopting LEAP2 have good reason to be able to reassure customers that the information put in to their system will be able to be reused in the future by any other compliant system dealing with portfolio information. In general, learners' information is "safe", in that it will be able to be retrieved from their system, not lost.

Backup / restore
LEAP2, with very little customisation, provides a format enabling full backup / restore of portfolio information across the same or different installations of the same e-portfolio system. It is also effective as a format that can be used by learners themselves, backing up to their own private storage, and being able to read much of the content using an unmodified browser. Future supplementary tools are likely to extend the range of possibilities for reading in different ways.

Co-ordination with other suppliers
As LEAP2A can be used as the basic format for exchange between different kinds of systems dealing with learner-related information, (but not, note, other kinds of administrative information out of the control of the individual,) vendors can design collaboration of different tools and services together, relieving HEIs of the burden of designing the integration.

More features for less cost
As LEAP2 is adopted more widely, across different kinds of systems that deal with learner-centred information, vendors will be able to offer more features and services than they were previously able to, at a greatly reduced cost.

Confidence
The more confidence there is in the reusability of portfolio information in general, the more decision-makers are likely to move forward with the implementation of e-portfolio and related systems.

Wide adoption
The more widely adopted is LEAP2, the more the general learning technology interoperability argument gains credibility, respectability, and momentum. It amounts to a substantial step towards modularisation and interchangability, promoting competition and choice between vendors.