Telling E-portfolio Stories

Telling E-portfolio Stories: The road to 'stickiness' 5th June 2008
University of Wolverhampton Institute for Learning Enhancement

I attended this event to find out the kind of projects that are using e-portfolios and to assist me with implementing an e-portfolio tool on my project.

The programme for the day can be viewed here

A very busy extremely well organised day packed with e-portfolio stories from HE institutions around the UK.

There were 27 twenty minute presentations about e-portfolio experiences as well as 8 other presentations that were e-portfolio related.

The 27 presentations were arranged into three one hour sessions of three presentations, so each individual could attend only 9 out of the 27.

The organisers have assured me that the material will be posted at the link above soon.

We were given an abstract of each of the 27 presentations which gave a brief outline and in most cases the tools used.

I did a quick count and found that:

14 used PebblePad
5 used Blackboard
3 used WebCT
1 used MS Word
1 was based on using a USB key

There were 3 others that I could not make out what tool was used (from the abstract)

I also made a note of the subject area that the e-portfolio project had been used (where it was clear):

Psychology - PDP
Psychology - ePDP
PGCE
PGCE - Assessment
PGCE - CPD
PGCE - evidence of standards
Graduate Teaching Programme - Professional Development
Occupational Therapy - CPD
Radiotherapy and Oncology - CPD
Midwifery - Evidence of achievement
Social Work - PDP
Social Work - Assessment of Practice
Computing - Career development
Business Information Systems - PDP
Science and Engineering - PDP
Travel Operations Management - all course work
Choreography into Performance - on line artists sketchbook
PDP generally across the university

With a couple of exceptions e-portfolios are being used for the more vocational subjects, particularly when students are on placement and for teaching, health related and PDP activity.

Summary of the key issues/challenges that people faced and the things that help:

1. Make sure the e-portfolio is embedded into the module/course
2. Make sure the system works well before using it. Easy to lose interest very quickly
3. E-portfolio and VLE should be kept separate if possible
4. IT competency of users plays a big part. Training, support, user group etc
5. Create templates for users to refer to and to use
6. How to move past the 'champions' and build staff capability and capacity
7. Important to use blended learning methods (not e-portfolio on its own)
8. Need to give regular feedback and re-enforcement to users of an e-portfolio
9. Link to life after university (exportable)