Student Centered ePortfolio

An interesting post from Kev Brace over at JISC Regional Support Centre West Midlands. It talks about models and resources:

http://kev-brace.blogspot.com/2009/07/student-centered-eportfolio-space.html

Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology

Special issue on e-Portfolios:

"EPs [electronic portfolios] support portfolio pedagogy by engaging individuals in deep reflection on their learning and acting as a central repository for a wide variety of multi-media artifacts that provide evidence of professional and intellectual growth as well as documenting the complex processes involved in learning."

This paper is a collection of work following on from the ePortfolio conference 2008 held by the European Institute for E-Learning (EIfEL). Papers include:

The value of eJournals to support ePortfolio development for assessment in teacher education -Susan Crichton, Gail Kopp

This paper is based on a two year pilot where ePortfolios were used for assessment on an inquiry-based teacher preparation program. The programme also explored social networking and communities of practice.

The relevance of this topic rests in the link between journaling and portfolio development as well as the integration of technology for authentic purposes. The students who were involved in this pilot left our program prepared to work differently, having experienced technology as an enabler of changed teaching and learning.

Interestingly the paper suggests that students had a different perspective of ePortfolios, and saw them as a collection of their best work, not necessarily their working process. They also fail to identify an ePortfolio as a stimulus for discussion or interaction. An interesting comment from a student focus group:

It was almost like it shouldn’t be called an ePortfolio, because you have a preconceived idea in your head already, and people think that you can try to get a job using that. But making it clear that you’re documenting your learning process, that’s a huge thing.

Comparing students’ perceptions of paper-based and electronic portfolios
Maarten van Wesel, Anouk Prop

This paper looks at (on a medical degree) the transition from paper to electronic portfolios and the student perception; the latter being of particular interest to me. It addresses the common benefits of ePortfolios such as development of ICT skills and the ability to easily share media. Another interesting point made is that the software does not determine the quality of the portfolio:

"Previous research showed that the quality of a portfolio does not depend on the medium used."
"Although ePortfolios are being used more frequently in higher education, little attention has been paid to comparing them to their paper-based counter parts. Current ePortfolio research focuses mostly on the specific features an electronic portfolio has to offer. While the above mentioned points truly can be advantageous, educational innovation always asks for caution. When moving from a paper-based portfolio to the digital variant, we must assure ourselves that our original portfolio goals are not lost. In other words, electronic portfolios and paper-based portfolios ought to be compared on their shared potential merits, such as support for self-reflection, preferably in a similar ecological setting."

An interesting point is the suggestion that eportfolios are user-friendly for mentors, somethings which isn't all too common in practice. Software aside, the main objective of this study is the student perception of support from eportfolio for self-reflection. The study identifies that reflection is an important part of the eportfolio:

"Self-reflection is an essential precondition for the professional development of medical students, since it helps students “become aware of their mental structures, subject them to a critical analyses, and if necessary, restructure them” "

Another interesting factor highlighted is the importance of the role of the mentors. Overall the report concludes that students found both paper and eportfolio equally useful; more time was spent working on eportfolios, this may have been for a number of reasons including the time or required to learn the software, time spent editing work or simply because they enjoy using the eportfolio.

Following on from the study, there are some key issues raised:

1. Does the portfolio medium affect the learning outcomes, and if so, how?
2. What is the perception of teaching staff of the two different portfolio media?
3. What is the impact of technical errors on student perceptions and learning outcomes?

ePortfolio 2009 - London

The 2009 ePortfolio conference is a major international event bringing together practitioners from all over the world. The conference is organised by the European Institute for E-Learning and will be held at City University, London on 22-24 July.

The conference seems to be packed with useful sessions and experts in the field such as Dr. Helen Barrett who's eportfolio group I've been following for some time now: http://groups.google.com/group/web2eportfolios/about?hl=en

A programme is currently available on this page:
http://www.epforum.eu/lfl2009/conference/programme


To see the enormity of the conference take a look this eifel event attendee location map: http://www4.clustrmaps.com/counter/maps.php?user=a5770c6f - quite literally the 4 corners!

Visible Learning

It is taken for granted that students learn from their experiences during education from staff. However, at Washington State University staff learn from their students.

Staff learned that students are:

INNOVATIVE in their use of technology, doing much to help us understand the power and potential of new tools.

RESOURCEFUL in their strategies to use academic work to understand their communities and the world.

RIGOROUS in tracking their own learning progress.

SAVVY at recognizing great learning opportunities beyond the classroom.

PERCEPTIVE in their use of peer feedback as a critical resource for deepening their learning.

CREATIVE in selecting strong data and evidence in unexpected areas to understand and explain their own academic growth.

Read more about it here: https://my.wsu.edu/portal/page?_pageid=177,298566&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL

This clearly shows that students are more than capable of reflective learning, and producing some very positive output.

Posted by Ray Tolley on the eportfolios-and-plts group

PebblePad Update Version 2.3.3

PebblePad has just released an update available for self hosting institutions to download and install.

There's quite a long list of fixes and enhancements, but I've listed a very brief summary here:

• Bug: Entering more detail about an activity in the experience asset without entering an
  activity title results in the details being lost
  Fix: It is now not possible to add more detail without entering an activity title
  
  
• Bug: Entering HTML into a comment produces an error
  Fix: HTML is now accepted and is displayed as plain text in a comment
  
  
• New: Added last viewed to rollover on recipient list
  Displays the last time a recipient has viewed an asset in the asset synopsis pad
  
  
• New: Support files other than index/default.htm(l) for websites
  This allows exports from Sakai to be imported as websites
  
  
• Bug: PebblePad stores the local path of uploaded files as the file name when uploading from
  some browsers, this causes error when exporting
  Fix: Local path information is removed during upload
  

The full 13 page PDF is available here: PebblePad Release Notes V2.3.3

PebblePad >> To Go >>

PebblePad have several new ways to get onto PebblePad on the move:

• Use PebblePDA the program designed to operate on Windows Mobile PDA’s and Smartphones
• Use Pebble SendR the java-based file upload tool compatible with most mobile devices
• Use Pebble Mobile to access a very simple version of PebblePad via the browser on any mobile device

I've had a go at the last option, which brings up a clean interface with simple HTML links that work. It doesn't look great, but the fact is when you're on the move you just want it to simple and quick.

I'm not able to test out the other options on my current phone, but when I get my hands on one I'll report back.

More details here: PebblePad Mobile

In response to Bill's question, I have an iPhone which isn't too accepting of files uploaded outside of Apple's iTunes. This would be possible with another 'smarth phone' or PDA.

Foundation Year Portfolios

I looked into the NHS Foundation year portfolios last year and at some of materials and guidance used for the portfolio. It may be worthwhile to consider showing first year students this guidance and material, or at least an overview of what's expected of them after they graduate from their five year medical degree.

I've uploaded my summary of the NHS Foundation Learning Portfolio (2008) here.

Reflective Writing

Reflective Writing - Guidance Notes for Students
Pete Watton; Jane Collings; Jenny Moon
April 2001

This pack looks mainly at reflective writing for work-based/experience modules but can be applied across the board. Essentially it is an informative paper with some background theory on reflection and a few exercises with case studies. Overall the pack seems quite useful and manages to provide a good overview of reflection in a way that most students are able to understand. It makes use of material that students may relate to, such as a reference to reflection in Harry Potter:

‘Harry stared at the stone basin. The contents had returned to their original, silvery white state, swirling and rippling beneath his gaze.

“ What is it?” Harry asked shakily.

“This? It is called a Pensieve,” said Dumbledore. “ I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”

“Err,” said Harry who couldn’t truthfully say that he had ever felt anything of the sort.

“At these times” said Dumbledore, indicating the stone basin, “ I use the Penseive. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into a basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.’ ( Rowling 2000)

Learning Forum London and ePortfolio 2009

http://events.eife-l.org/lfl2009

This year's event main theme is "Innovation, Creativity and Accountability." It will be addressed over three days and three conferences:

• ePortfolio 2009 (7th international conference)
• Key Competencies—Skills for Life 2009 (3rd international conference)
• Learning Networks and Communities (4th international conference—previously Learning Regions & Cities)

Essay on the benefits of ePortfolios

Saw this peice on ePortfolios which looks at the way learning takes place and how portfolios are essential to this process:

“In an essay in the current issue of Academic Commons, three researchers write that “ePortfolios may be the most likely vehicle to help us make the transition to an academy of the future that is both relevant and authoritative.”

The article recognises the diversity and flexibility of ePortfolios and lists four main features:

• The ability to incorporate multimedia elements to support learning
• Linking together different areas of their learning in one environment
• Higher levels of engagement and immersion, retention and grades compared to those not using eportfolios
• Tracking progress of students over the duration of the course

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3668/electronic-portfolios-a-path-to-the-future-of-learning

Telling Stories Conference

JISC have announced this years ePortfolio Telling stories conference:

http://www.wlv.ac.uk/default.aspx?page=16960

10^th and 11^th June 2009 @ Wolverhampton University.

Last years conference was quite informative which also saw Shane from PebblePad speaking. It'll be interesting to see how the overall ePortfolio usage has progressed since then.

Guidance on reflection

A great informative guidance sheet for students at Hull University (Chris Pinder) on reflection. Although it's geared towards a paper based portfolio the underlying principles are still the same. This may prove useful when developing our own guidance. It's simple and concise:

http://www.hull.ac.uk/studyadvice/LearningResources/StudyGuidesPDFs/reflectlr.pdf

Pre-Induction

Last year I was involved with a pre-induction group which looked at preparing students for university life. One of the outputs from the group was Gale's Skills4Uni development kit. Essentially it consisted of a programme of mini tasks/tests, each focusing on different areas of learning such as research, note taking, report writing etc.

The application is made available before the students start university but have accepted their offers. In much the same way as students in Engineering were given an assignment before they started their first term.

I had initial ideas of developing a pre-induction activity for the current first year MBChB cohort which we discussed in the team. We developed an idea of students being prepared for their first personal mentor meeting by doing a pre-induction activity which involved using PebblePad to create a profile of the students intentions, interests in medicine and motivations where. However, due to unforeseen circumstances we were unable to deliver this activity.

I think it would be very beneficial to ensure that this activity is delivered for the new cohort in Autumn.

Reflective learning video

Just found a really good video about reflective learning from a students perspective. It seems quite creative and gets the message across in 3mins! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWVte5Iwr28

Teaching & Learning

After my the second IP session with Glenn's group I had time to discuss portfolios with Glenn. We had an interesting discussion about the aim of ePoftfolios and difficulties I may encounter with teaching and learning aspect of reflection. The conversation addressed the priority of teaching and learning within a research led institution, and whether the current climate of economic uncertainty and reduction of research funding would lead to trend towards a focus teaching and learning.

One of interesting points made was that a lot academics have no formal teaching qualifications. This raises the question of formal teaching qualifications/training are required in order to teach a subject in HE; one could argue that being a specialist in a field is sufficient to teach it. Should academics be informed about teaching practises? Is the role of the academic in HE to teach or to deliver information and support the learning process?

I need to look at ways in reflective learning can be taught or supported. Essentially, this is what is required for ePortfolio use.

Student reflections

Started recieving reflections back from first year students over the weekend, and to say that I'm impressed is quite an understatement. At present about half the group have shared reflections which are suprisingly good, given the fact they had very little guidance.

Students effectively reflected on their learning process, some in more depth than others. However, only one student included reflections on what they had actually learnt. I'm still waiting for the rest of the reflections to come through to get a better snap shot of the group.

First year IP session

Attended a first year IP session on Thursday. The session difference from the second year sessions in the fact that all work concerning the case study is carried out in a single day, where as second year students have two weeks to research and present.

I was told to expect the first year students to be quite timid. However, they seems fairly involved and really eager to learn. The facillitator, Clare, instructed the students at the end of the session to reflect on their learning using PebblePad. She spoke about the benefits of recording their learning and suggested that it would be a useful as revision material for the end of year/module exam, overall she had a very positive attitude and has opted for her own account. I gave brief instructions (refresher) to the students, explaining how to get to the Webfolio tool in PebblePad and to use their paper based portfolio form a guideline. They were asked to share their reflections with both Clare and myself.

Trial run - flexibility of webfolios.

I have contacted Prem Kumar and Glenn regarding a trial run of PebblePad ePortfolio with the a group of IP students.

As mentioned in the IP session 2 post below the students generally produce low tech, but very effective presentations. I believe changing this element of the IP sessions would be counterproductive and students would simply get bogged down with 'having' to use technology for technology's sake.

I propose a solution where the students supplement their IP sessions by recording their learning, just as they do with the paper based portfolio forms handed out at the session, but electronically. The aim of this would be to create a record of all IP case studies over the duration of the course.

The students will be using the webfolio tool in PebblePad to record their learning and populate it over the year. The ability of being able to merge/add one webfolio into another means that students can create individual webfolios for each year specifically for IP and then merge them into one webfolio covering all years. In addition to this students can create an overall webfolio for the MBChB course and populate with the IP webfolio, the SSA webfolio as well as other webfolios created for other modules/subjects on the course.

The webfolio can then be exported into a HTML format at the end of the course for the student to keep for future reference. There may also be a opportunity for the Medical school to keep/archive a copy of each students work for future reference, audits etc.

The ability to embed one webfolio into another brings the opportunity to create a felxible eportfolio. As stated above, webfolios can be created for each module/subject on a yearly basis. These yearly webfolios can then be either drawn together as an overall webfolio for the module over the duration of the course, or be compiled to give an view of learning during an academic year for whole course, i.e. embedding webfolios from each module/subject for a particular year into MBChB 1 for example. As well as this, students would be able to create a custom eportfolio for a specific purpose; for example, bringing together webfolios from different years and modules to show a particular learning path/story.

Each of the boxes in the simple diagram below represents a webfolio. The idea is that students pull together specific webfolios into any particular sequence they require; like building with Lego bricks, you decide what parts you need for any particular model.

IP Session 2nd Year

Attended second year IP session with Glenn Matthews. This particular group seemed to be quite active and engaged in the learning process being able to independently assign each other tasks, brainstorm around a new case study and formulate mindmaps from the brainstorm. Presentations were innovitive, well thought out and it was clear that learning was taking place as the information was disseminated back the rest of the group and feedback received.

One noticible point was the lack of technology used during presentations. OHP acetates were used and had been hand written which would possibly indicate either a lack of presentation/powerpoint skills or last minute preparation. The room had only an OHP, whiteboard and OHP screen for students to use to present. This may need to be address when looking at the use of ePortfolios to support IP. After the session Glenn had suggested that this was a particularly lively group and did not need to interfere with the session as the students were more than capable of directing their own learning. We met with another member of staff who had also just given an IP session in which she found the students needed a fair amount of support. It may be beneficial to sit in on one of these sessions to gain a better veiw of the learning processes and how an ePortfolio tool may benefit those students that experience difficulty with the case studies.

Overall the session was a positive experience and I have been invited back to the follow-on session on 3rd March, as well as attending a first year IP session on 26th Feb.

Catching up

Initial project meeting:
Had a very positive meeting with Prem Kumar (IP module owner) who provided a good outline of the IP module with specfics as to how the module is run. Arranged to pick up facilitator guides and attend and observe IP sessions from years one and two. The outcome of the meeting is the statement of work whcih can be found here:

Statement of work - Medical LIP IP


Mind Maps:
Looked into mind meister which seems to be a very competent tool, however the free version only allows 6 mind maps and the eduction version free trial only lasts 30 days and costs $15 (US) per year.

The education version has added features, some of which maybe essential such as the ability to creat and edit mind maps offline. The free version has enough features to satisfy the requirements of most student needs and the limitation can be overcome by creating more than one account per group or editing and export and rediting the same maps.

Mind Meister is a fairly simple tool to use and can export to a variety of formats including GIF, JPEG and PDF, as well as text based (RTF) output. However, some added functionality is lost when exporting to these formats, such as links and attachments. However, these are not required for this course.

PowerPoint can also be used to create mindmaps with aid of the drawing tools and text boxes. PowerPoint has the added benefit of being available across campus as standard, although students may not have MS Office installed on personal computers. Exporting can be output to a number of formats including JPEGS.

I have found a good resource for mind map information: www.mind-map.co.uk which explains and provides guidance on mind mapping techniques and also has a list of tools available commercially. Most of the tools however, are quite expensive.


ePortfolio Best Practice (ongoing research):

Penn State's E-Portfolio Initiative (Johnson and DiBiase 2004)"the nature and potential benefits must precede the design and deployment of an enterprise e-portfolio"

Institutions should not skip steps that are critical to understanding pedagogical issues related to ePortfolio implementation

Beyond the Electronic Portfolio: A lifetime Personal Web Space (Cohn and Hibbitts 2004): This paper poses the question of whether e-portfolios are the way forward, and whether a system carried by the user through out a lifetime is more beneficial. Although some of the ideas seem excessive I believe it is essentially what we want from an e-portfolio tool.

Purpose of this blog

I intend to keep this blog as ongoing record of my workflow in the project development for Integrated Problems, as part of the Learning Independence Project. The first few postings will be a catch up and subsequently I will log progress of the project. It will also be a place for me to store links and thoughts about the project.