ePortfolios - wow!

I was quite excited about the session around designing ePortfolios,at the International Distance Education conference in August. Much more interested than I thought I would be. My first impression was that they are a digital store of a student's work. A photo album. But I was wrong. They can be much more.

The session was delivered by the Director of Education at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital. She leads the undergraduate doctors, and is using eProtfolios as a way of them telling their stories of personal and professional development. She had to design the system from scratch, so her presentation was around the thinking she did to make a robust, yet almost intimate record of each doctor's learning and progress.
She put her young doctors into the position of learner from the outset, and worked on them developing insightful, honest and tolerant attitudes to themselves as learners. She also had to consider who were the audiences for the ePortfolios, and at which levels those audiences had access. For example - who has access to clinical records, who has access to personal diaries, and who has access to collaborative project work? Her motto was " Every job is a self portrait of the person who did it. Autograph your work with excellence ".

She also had to design sensible ways of creating ePortfoilos and then sensitive ways of assessing the work submitted to ePortfolios. Her criteria for creating them was:
- content
- design
- use of multi media
- ease of navigation
- varied formats for text and visuals

Her assessment rubric for content in the ePortfolios was:
- how the student represents their work : wikis, blogs, chat rooms, i-tunes etc
- their knowledge, skills and understanding
- use of visuals
- written effectiveness
- reflection on their learning

She sees the ePortfolios as an evidence based record of their education. A good example would include:
- how they document their practice
- how they reflect on their learning
- how they show they are integrating their experiences
- how the evidence maps onto their learning goals or course standards
- how they use it as a lifelong learning tool

Her ePortfolios are a " creative representation of your own work ". They :
- demonstrate breadth of learning and research
- show a range of achievements
- evaluate achievement of learning outcomes
- reflect and self assess
- illustrate a learning process
- share the experience with others.

She sees the benefits of these ePortfolios as:
- allowing deeper levels of thinking around organising your own work
- non linear thinking
- creating interest for yourself and your audiences
- practising technical skills
- being portable, accessible, minimal, life long and learner centered

She also sees one ePortfolio as having different levels:
- personal ( reflective, decision making )
- learning ( providing a framework for assessing progress )
- professional ( showing evidence of the skills for employment and training )
- institutional ( showing evidence of activities completed )

She promotes a simple, staged approach to submitting materials into your ePortfolio:
1. Collect ( what can I put in ? )
2. Select ( what will I put in, and for what audience? )
3. Reflect ( what did I learn ? )
4. Connect ( what was I taught ? )

She also has a simple, staged approach to developing ePortfolios in an organisation :
1. Design ( what do we want ? )
2. Develop ( what are the technical requirements, templates and formats )
3. Document ( your prototype )
4. Deploy ( launch and go live )
5. Display ( share, support and develop the rules ).

So it's with a bit of excitement that I look forward to our ePortfolios. I'm especially intersted in how our colleagues in Early Childhood may lead on this. They have the expertise in using narratives about learning in a particular context, and about listening to stories to show and record learning. I look forward to how they may teach us all about the humanity for the technology. I think most four year olds would be able to choose what they want in their portfolio, tell you why, say who is allowed to see it, and what they learned from the experience. The learning for us is whether we can adapt our teaching to respond to the many, many, new and developing ways of evidence being presented to us, and whether we can then describe the journey that was taken and the journey still underway. It will take partnership, dialogue, understanding and empathy withh our students. And I hope, heaps of fun.