Friday, March 27, 2009

CAL 2009: Using an e-portfolio

Captured live at #cal09, posted late.

‘There was a lot of learning going on.’ Using an e-portfolio to support learning activities in a professional course for new HE lecturers
Sarah Chesney and C. Marcangelo, University of Cumbria, UK

Using e-portfolios with staff doing post-graduate certificate. The university uses PebblePad but realised what they were doing was creating a Personal Learning System rather than a simple ePortfolio.

Used a "patchwork text" technique where a number of short pieces are written over time and then sewn together using reflexive commentary at the end. {Fairly sure she said "reflexive" rather than "reflective". Is that right? - DM} Important that the drafts of their short texts were shared at regular intervals for comment from peers and tutors.

Feedback was gathered through online survey (anonymous) and focus groups over two different cohorts. Themes investigated included Formative Feedback and Use of the ePortfolio.

One danger of formative feedback raised was a concern that it would be plagiarism to use peer feedback to improve work. Also concern that formative feedback didn't match the summative criteria.

Use of ePortfolio - participants tended to critique the software rather than discuss the concept of learning portfolio. Also, some were concerned that concentration was on presentation rather than content.

Conclusions

Do we need to recognise process outcomes as well as final outcomes. From a course point of view, how do we deal with tools that will be in perpetual beta?

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