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Web-based electronic portfolios can be stored on the World Wide Web (The Internet) or on a much smaller platform. An alternative to the Internet is a much cheaper Intranet. Companies often have their own Intranet, educational institutions likewise. The latter encourage students to ‘upload’ their homework on the college or university Intranet, to file papers, research reports, doctoral theses, etc., and of course NVQ portfolios. Documents, graphics and sound are stored in different ways.

Documents can be posted on the Internet and on Intranets in the form of well-know computer applications, such as .DOC (usually Microsoft WORD), .XLS (Excel spreadsheets) and most popularly, .PDF (Portable Document Format). This is a “hard-copy” format. A third party cannot usually alter WORD documents converted into PDFs, so what is converted into a PDF stays converted.

Graphical images. A scanner can be used to convert pictures and facsimiles of documents, forms etc. to an electronic format such as .BMP (Bitmap), .TIF (Tagged Image File Format), or most popularly .JPG (Joint Photo Experts’ Group). The popularity and universality of the JPEG format is due to the fact that a typical JPEG image uses far fewer bytes of memory and storage than either BMP or TIFF.

Sound. If you use a digital sound recorder you can convert speech, music or analogue-recorded sound to any one of several digital formats. The software, which came with your digital recorder, is the first step in transferring sound to your PC. AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) will produce the highest quality reproduction and AIFF files can be stored on ordinary CDs with further copies easily made. Remember that the maximum length of a recording you can store on an audio CD will be about 80 minutes. The more economical formats are sometimes made by downgrading the AIFF files, often by reducing the bandwidth to the equivalent of ‘telephone speech’

Self-contained electronic portfolios have a number of important advantages. You can store an electronic portfolio on your own PC, using the formats described above, and adapt this in any way you wish. However, what we at Chris McAllister Limited have been doing for some years is burning electronic portfolios onto CD-ROMs and publishing them in this way. A single CD-ROM weighs only a fraction of the weight of a ‘hard copy”
Portfolio and is very cheap to copy.

4. Electronic portfolios on CD-ROM

Using the formats described above or a selection of them we get the files in the NVQ portfolio onto a CD-ROM as follows:

Observation. Skills and procedures which have been observed by the Assessor can be photographed using still frames or short video clips can be uploaded in JPEG or MPEG (video) format and stored on the disk.

Interviews (“Professional Discussions” we call them!) are recorded in digital sound and stored, ideally in the ‘telephone speech’ WAV format (16 bit, 8 kHz). Although the sound may have been downgraded, you still get more than a minute to a megabyte, and as your disk probably will not hold more than about 720 MB at most, 12 hours will be your maximum recording time on a single CD-ROM, which is usually enough for most purposes. You still need to leave space for the other files, most of which will be much less than a megabyte each.

Documents. Documentary evidence will be needed to support and corroborate spoken statements. Photographs come out as JPEGs and paper documents can be scanned and saved in the JPEG format also. Because most photographs taken with a good quality digital camera will occupy more than a megabyte you can use the Save for Web command in Photoshop to shrink both size and memory. The results will still be acceptable.

HTML. This the Hypertext Markup Language which is used to link Internet files together. On our CD-ROM electronic portfolios we set up a branching file arrangement based on a single central file. This should be named. Index.html. Click on this and you have arrived at the “Hyde Park Corner” of the CD-ROM and all the other files are accessible from here. Blue underlined hyperlinks, familiar to you from browsing the Internet will link you with each file in turn.

Here is what happens. You first of all insert the CD-ROM electronic Portfolio in the CD slot in your PC or Macintosh. After a few seconds this should Autorun (i.e. start to open on its own). If for any reason this does happen, open the disk manually and search for the Index.html file. Double click to open this. You should now begin to see that we meant by the Index file being the “Hyde Park Corner” of the CD-ROM as we said in the previous paragraph above. With the help of the blue underlined hyperlinks you can open each of the other files in turn.

The sound files are designed to work differently. There is usually a sound file (recognisable from the suffix .Wav) attached to each part of the NVQ (Unit or Element). Clicking on this will open Windows Media Player for you and when this is running with the volume adjusted to your satisfaction you can then use the Minimise button (-) in the top right hand corner of the screen to leave the sound file playing in the background while you explore other files on the disk.