Elearning:E-Portfolio

From UBC Wiki

e-Portfolios are personalized, online collections of an individual’s work that are chosen by the individual to represent his or her knowledge, skills and interests to diverse audiences. Developed over time, an e-Portfolio shows what the owner has done in a course, degree program, or during their career. An e-Portfolio can include essays, presentations, research papers, images, videos, projects, reports, work samples, or anything else. The individual can also add personal thoughts and written reflections about the pieces of work included in the portfolio, and can invite feedback from others. This can help the individual see his or her personal development over a period of time, as it provides a way to look back and reflect upon what has been accomplished. Highly customizable, e-Portfolios allow the user to assemble subsets of their work to present to instructors, potential employers, and others via login. This way, the owner can provide selective access to individuals or the public.

"Folio thinking" promotes self-awareness, motivation, and direction and provides invaluable support to individuals in academic, professional, and social settings.

Introduction

Portfolios have shown great potential to document individual learning and growth for UBC students and faculty. The e-Portfolio is an approach that gives the student a sense of ownership and puts them at the centre of their learning process. Through the UBC Campus-Wide Online Environment for E-Portfolios: Community Building and Pilot Projects, we have studied the use of e-Portfolios and have found out more about the challenges and benefits of this human-centered approach.

UBC conducted a three-year pilot project (2003-2006) that was funded by the Teaching & Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) to investigate the use of e-portfolios and to find out more about the challenges and benefits of this human-centered approach. The success and benefits seen in the pilot are many and include an increase in community and group work amongst students and instructors and an elevated student understanding of the connections between their learning pillars. Students and instructors felt that, after grasping the folio thinking process, they were better able to reflect on their learning and teaching goals at the university. The e-Portfolio Pilot Project also gave students and faculty a chance to develop their skills and abilities in information technology. By digitizing their work and developing and managing their own personal e-Portfolio Web sites, they received hands-on experience with a wide variety of technologies that they did not have access to previously.

e-Portfolios@UBC project

Background Information

UBC launched a campus-wide e-Portfolio pilot project, Campus-Wide Online Environment for e-Portfolios: Community Building and Pilot Projects, in September 2003. Five projects launched in Year One of this project. They were: Agricultural Sciences, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Science, TAG, and Teacher Education. Four new pilots launched in the fall of 2004: Enrolment Services, Interprofessional Rural Program, Learning Technology Professional Staff, and Master's of Education. The project brought together academic staff, and administrative stakeholders to understand the requirements of implementing university-wide e-Portfolio systems.

All told, 12 projects, 2000 students, 91 instructors, and 37 staff (central & department/faculty) participated in this campus-wide project. Individuals from each user group played a variety of roles in the project, ranging from students hired to support other students creating e-portfolios to instructors introducing them in the classroom to staff in departmental instructional support and central units supporting the associated technologies. The project was coordinated centrally by an e-Portfolio Community of Practice Coordinator, based in the Office of Learning Technology, but each individual pilot was managed locally by the member departments.

The individual pilot projects and aligned work of the Community of Practice have enabled the campus to investigate the spectrum of uses for e-Portfolios, from preparing to enter university through to ongoing professional practice. These projects have benefitted a wide variety of students, including traditional undergraduate students, non-traditional students and graduate students. Indirect benefits to UBC's learning environment have been seen through the cultivation of more reflective teachers, practitioners, and students, and the development of a diversity of ways to conduct learner-centered practice.

Example e-Portfolio

Past Projects

As shown in the figure below, the twelve pilot projects (English, Enrollment Services, International Peer Program, Land and Food Systems, Medicine, Pathology, Pharmacy, Science, MET, OLT, TAG and Teacher Education) and the affiliated projects have helped us understand how e-Portfolios can be used in an effective way at a variety of levels: from university admission, to full courses, to courses spanning a degree program, and to professional practice. Below is a brief summary of the different pilot projects.

Eport projects 2005.jpg

English

Course authors from the Department of English and the University Writing Centre, in conjunction with Distance Education and Technology, re-designed two major third year writing courses - English 301 (Business and Technical Writing, 3.0 credits) and English 303 (Intermediate Composition, 6.0 credits) - to incorporate e-portfolios. One of the core goals of this project was to incorporate the e-Portfolio approach to engage students in critical evaluation of their own writing and that of their peers. Both of these courses are offered completely online. The longer term plan is to integrate this innovative approach to learning and assessment into the on-campus versions of both courses.

Contact: Jeff Miller at jeff.miller@ubc.ca

Enrolment Services

Access Studies is a new program that provides non-traditional learners an opportunity to register in academic UBC courses without the usual basis of admission. The portfolio was envisioned as a means by which students can demonstrate their readiness to enroll in courses, identify their academic goals and monitor their own progress.

Contact: Marianne Schroeder at marianne.schroeder@ubc.ca

International Peer Program

This program engages over 200 international students and 200 returning UBC students in an exchange of intercultural dialogue, practically supporting the academic, social, and cultural transition of new students. Folio thinking in the context of creating e-Portfolios was used to elevate the learning for students and deepen their understanding of their place in the program and in society through reflection.

Contact: Michelle Suderman at michelle.suderman@ubc.ca

Land and Food Systems

Guided by the pilot project experience with a senior-level, career-oriented course, e-Portfolio development was introduced in AGSC100, the foundation course for all students in the faculty. The course provides an orientation to the programs, learning environment and core values of the Faculty. Building e-Portfolios throughout the students' undergraduate years will be an integral part of an active, reflective, learner-centered environment that includes Problem-Based Learning, career preparation, mentoring and experiential learning.

Contact: Cyprien Lomas at cyprien.lomas@ubc.ca

Learning Technology Professional Staff

Professional staff supporting e-learning at UBC are a diverse group, with equally diverse backgrounds and skills. Learning Technology is a new and dynamic field, lacking the well-defined job roles and classifications of more established career areas. Professionals in these roles are called upon to advise faculty members on implementing technology for instructional purposes - a function that requires both technical and pedagogical knowledge. This project provided a scaffold for Learning Technology professionals to document their skills, knowledge and experience, and assisted them with identifying areas of strength and weakness. It also provided a means for systematically identifying the types of professional development opportunities that should be made available so that the professional staff can better support faculty and students.

Contact: Kele Fleming at kele.fleming@ubc.ca

Master's of Education

The BC Teacher Qualification Service (TQS) has asked that all Masters Students in Education who are teachers show evidence of a "culminating experience" that provides evidence of professional and academic reflection over distance programs. Education graduate students used e-Portfolios for reflection, learning, and self-expression. An additional benefit for education graduate students is that by engaging in technology now, their new found knowledge will have a significant impact when they start teaching.

Contact: Marion Porath at morion.porath@ubc.ca

Medicine

Portfolios are commonly used in medicine as part of professional development and evaluation to assess the professional attitudes of doctors. The Faculty of Medicine Undergraduate Program implemented e-Portfolios in September 2005 as a means of looking at students' attitudes towards learning, specifically by facilitating students' recording, reflecting on, and evidencing the attainment of specific learning outcomes.

Contact: Justin Bonzo at justin.bonzo@ubc.ca

Pathology

"Bacterial Infection in Humans" (PATH417) is a course that teaches students how to apply the knowledge they are accumulating about infectious diseases to an unknown situation or "case". The course is delivered entirely online via WebCT. Students are given an infectious disease case accompanied by a series of questions along with suggestions on the resources that will allow them to acquire the knowledge and understanding to answer these questions. They are given a few days to work through these questions on their own before they join in a group discussion of the case to arrive at a group consensus answer. The group answer is posted to a class discussion area that allows the different groups to compare and contrast their answers to the case questions.

Contact: Niamh Kelly at niamh.kelly@ubc.ca

Pharmaceutical Sciences

A shift to a new outcomes-driven curriculum prompted the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences to pilot the use of e-Portfolios. The e-Portfolios provided a framework for students to document their progress and provided a comprehensive assessment framework for evaluating the effectiveness of the new curriculum.

Contact: Ingrid Price at iprice@interchange.ubc.ca

Science

Biology 240 is a lab course that uses guided inquiry. As part of the course assignments, students are required to fill in a lab journal at the end of each class. However, students were not required to reflect, over-all, on the entire process that is reflected in their journals. The e-Portfolio project facilitated further reflection and integration of materials in the course and across other courses, and helped create meta-reflective individuals and peer-to-peer learning environments. This type of reflection encourages on-going dialogue and individual, instructor, course, and, potentially, program reflection.

Contact: Leah Macfadyen at leah.macfadyen@ubc.ca

TAG

Evidence of teaching performance is often sought for purposes of hiring, promotion and tenure. Teaching portfolios are the accepted method for documenting evidence of achievement in teaching. Parts of the teaching portfolio can form the 'teaching' component of an individual's curriculum vitae. The teaching portfolio creation, development and storage process has been significantly enhanced and improved through the use of e-portfolios. The process of developing electronic teaching portfolios also contributes to good teaching by encouraging self-reflection, and by stimulating self-analysis and self-development.

Contact: Jan Johnson at janice.johnson@ubc.ca

Teacher Education

Teachers being prepared to perform in an increasingly digital world need to be experienced and competent in using digital technologies for their learning, evaluation and self-expression. In this pilot, students developed e-Portfolios to demonstrate their learning, reflect on their learning and "market" themselves.

Contact

Kele Fleming

Manager of Professional Development
UBC Office of Learning Technology
Room 1170, 2329 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4604.827.9287
kele.fleming@ubc.ca

See Also

Other Resources

Articles on UBC's e-Portfolio Project

Community of Practice Design

Conceptual Articles

How to Create a Portfolio

Good Practices

Research about portfolio practices

Portfolios to assess and empower students

Reflections

Rubrics

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