VMAP Visual Mapping of Portfolios

About the VMAP Project

Round 2 Developments

The VMAP Project has received further funding to develop the software, carry out pilot implementations and user trials. The funding from round 2 of the Distributed elearning Programme covers developments from June 2005 to March 2006.

Round 1 Developments

The VMAP project was initially funded by JISC under round 1 of the Distributed elearning Programme, from September 2004 - March 2005. The purpose of the VMAP project was to develop an elearning tool that would enable the development of ePortfolios. The particular approach that the project team adopted was to allow the development (and display) of a portfolio using a visual map to allow the representation of the portfolio. Further details from the VMAP project page on the JISC website.

Project documentation available from the Project Development pages held within the E-learning framework website.

About the VMAP Software

Software

The broad aim is to provide a software tool that will be more accessible to dyslexics and better enable them to produce an e-Portfolio than existing tools.

VMAP portfolio screenshot

The objectives of the project are to:

Enable the learner to interact with a pre-defined institutional template for preparing e Portfolios in a format that is most accessible to the learner;
Enable the learner to plan, construct and update an e Portfolio through the use of a visual mapping interface, on their own personal desktop;
Enable the learner to share, publish and disseminate an e Portfolio through the use of a visual mapping interface, to their institutional system.

Getting the Software

The software is written in Java using Java 1.4.2+, so should run on all operating systems. You can download versions of VMAP from our files page on sourceforge, or run the latest version using Java Web start. If you are more adventurous and would like to download the project from the sourceforge code repository using cvs, then you can from our cvs pages.