An ePortfolio That Works Without Internet

This post is about building for the digital divide, not pretending it does not exist.

The Portfolio Problem

An ePortfolio is where students collect their work and lecturers track progress and grade it. Great in theory. But every ePortfolio system assumes two things: a reliable internet connection and someone technical enough to install it. In much of Indonesia, neither assumption holds.

So the tools meant to help learning end up excluding the students who need them most. That is the digital divide in action.

YADeH

I built YADeH (Yet Another Distributed ePortfolio for Higher Education). It comes in two versions. YADeH-server runs online, in the cloud. YADeH-node runs offline, on a laptop or a tiny device.

The node version is the interesting one. Built with Flask, it is tiny (the framework itself is under 1 MB). It uses SQLite, so no separate database to install. It uses Bootstrap, so it works on phones without a native app. Run one command and it becomes a working ePortfolio server. Plug it into an access point, and a whole classroom of students can submit their work over local WiFi, with no internet at all.

The Sync Trick

The clever part is synchronization. Both the node and the server keep a log with timestamps. When the node finally connects to the internet, the two compare logs. Whichever side has the newer version wins. If the node is newer, it uploads. If the server is newer, it downloads. Students work offline all week, then sync everything in seconds when a connection appears.

This is distributed thinking applied to education. The data does not need to live in one central place all the time. It can live at the edge, on a small device in a classroom, and reconcile with the center when possible.

Why It Matters

Technology written for perfect conditions serves people who already have advantages. Technology written for imperfect conditions serves everyone. YADeH was my attempt to make sure a student in a classroom with no internet could still build a portfolio, submit their work, and be graded fairly.

Read the Full Paper

Read the full paper: The use of Microframework for Portable and Distributed ePortfolio Development →

Published at IEEE TALE 2019, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.