Software for Electronic Portfolio of Students of the Russian Higher Education

Abstract

The purpose of the study. For Russian universities, the problem of choosing the form of the electronic portfolio and its software is relevant; ensuring the formation of the electronic portfolio of the student is fixed in the requirements for the electronic information and educational environment of the educational institution by the current federal state standards for higher education in Russia. The purpose of the study is to develop recommendations on the choice of software based on the generalization of the practice of using the author’s capabilities of foreign and domestic software to organize work on the management of the electronic portfolio by students. The study was made as another step in the author’s development of the conceptual apparatus of the electronic portfolio subject field.Materials and methods. The author of the study has been teaching and organizing the educational work of students with an electronic portfolio since 2007: from 2007 to 2019 at the Southern Institute of Management (first as the Head of the Department of Applied Informatics, then as Rector’s Assistant for informatization and electronic training), from 2019 at the North Caucasus branch of the Russian State University of Justice and Kuban State University as a lecturer of Informatics, Psychology and Pedagogy. Only in the 2020-2021 academic years, students of these two universities during the study of the author’s educational disciplines with cloud tools Google and P7 Office conducted about 400 electronic portfolios. The criteria for comparing the software of the electronic portfolio from different developers were elaborated on the basis of the author’s vision of the functionality of the electronic portfolio in Russian universities as a virtual office of students. To determine the forms of the electronic portfolio used by Russian higher education institutions and the software used by them, the author analyzed the documentation on the organization of the institution’s electronic environment posted on the official websites of universities in the country.Results. During the study of components of the structural model of the investigated problem, the author classified and considered portfolio software options and revealed that the most functional form of the electronic portfolio is an electronic portfolio in the form of an Internet site, designed and supported according to the “software as a service” model. The following criteria were added to the list of traditional criteria for comparing electronic portfolio software from different developers by the author: the availability (number) of training tools for performing training tasks with ecosystem tools, into which the portfolio is integrated, and the presence of registration in the Unified Register of Russian programs for electronic computers and databases. The author supplemented the recommendations on the choice of software for the portfolio of universities with the wishes of its developers and customers.Conclusion. A number of Russian universities continue their own development of electronic portfolio systems “from scratch” without taking into account the existing developments in culture. This circumstance, as well as the fact of the dependence of most universities on foreign technology platforms that ensure the maintenance of an electronic portfolio, prompted the author to show the possibility of creating an electronic portfolio system by modifying the P7 Office ecosystem of office applications, in accordance with the existing example of using Google’s online ecosystem tools for electronic portfolio management.