LearnNet WordPress Blogs

PREVIOUS ePortfolio set up (20/21)

The current ePortfolio system has been used since the days of the ISLE project (2007). A separate WordPress installation is created for each student by course group or individually. Tutors are then added to the sites as required. Currently students have administrative rights to their own blog sites where tutors have contribution rights. The rights will remain the same.

Students who require an ePortfolio are provided with their own WordPress installation with a default set of posts inside. The default posts relate to eILP tasks which are no longer undertaken. Art students are provided with a customised version of the ePortfolio. This results in additional work as there is no way to create an ‘art’ template without specific scripting.

Objective

To accompany the new Moodle 3.9 site, MS Teams integration and increase in online provision, in the 2021/2 session every member of staff and student will be provided with their own WordPress blog employing the most up to date technology. WordPress powers approximately 40% of the world’s websites. It is an important digital literacy to be able to manage a WordPress website.

We aim to provide a blank site for all users but make available importable templates for ePortfolios, Art projects and more. Increasingly tutors asked for variations on the original ePortfolio template since the retirement of eILPs in ePortfolios.

Solution

The current system has outgrown it’s purpose. Having multiple WordPress installations means maintaining hundreds of installations (500 at present). This means that each plugin upgrade must be executed via custom scripts. The disk space required is not excessive but the management of the site is no longer simple enough.

The latest WordPress has multi site capabilities. A single WordPress installation will be employed containing a separate site for every member of staff and student. The use of the site will be entirely optional, however, as a public website this blog could be an important showcase for student’s work. This has been the case since the ISLE project when construction students used their ePortfolios to showcase their plumbing, brickwork, plastering, joinery and other construction work.

The WordPress CLI will be employed to create the user sites as MOOSH has been employed in Moodle 3.9 and Powershell to populate the MS Teams system.

Single Sign On (SSO)

Single sign on is maintained using the in-house plugin wp3-singlesignonlink.php. Staff and students will continue to log in to their blogs and portfolios via the student portal. Although WordPress has a system for manual login and email activation for user accounts this is not proposed to be used. We also provide the option to log in with Office 365. You do not need to access LearnNet to log in to your blog removing an unnecessary step.