Exploring the Diversity of ePortfolio Practice

Contents

Forewords 3

21st century skills for HRM students, Roisin Donnelly & Ann Masterson, Technological University Dublin 7

Creating Geographical Digital Stories with ePortfolio, Anne Dolan, Mary Immaculate College 11

Implementing a Pilot ePortfolio Initiative, Conor O'Neil, Waterford Institute of Technology 15

Designing a Culminating ePortfolio Showcase, Helen L. Chen, Stanford University 19

Embedding Digital Literacies with Audio, Jen Gennaco, University of New England 24

Evidencing Apprenticeships, Jonathan Murphy, Griffith College Dublin 28

Supporting Teaching Portfolio design with learning recall prompts, Margaret Keane, Maynooth University 34

Letter to My Advisor, Nora McCook, Bloomfield College 39

Journey Mapping for ePortfolio, Rachel Swinford, Lisa Angermeier, Rose Baker, Stephen Fallowfield, & Mark Urtel, IUPUI 44

Implementing Digital Ethics Support & Practice Principles for Faculty, Sarah Zurhellen, Appalachian State University 47

Writing in STEM, Theresa Conefrey, Santa Clara University 51

Tell Your Story with ePortfolio, Tracy Penny Light, St. George’s University 56

English As a Second Language, Rita Zuba Prokopetz, Educational Consultant 62

Cross Programme ePortfolio with a Student Centric Ethos, Andrew Harver, University of North Carolina 66

Transforming a Nursing Clinical Competency portfolio to an ePortfolio, Barbara Anne Nicolls, Buckinghamshire New University 70

Contact & Citation, 73

Foreword

By Lisa Donaldson, Founding Member Eportfolio Ireland

Hello readers, and welcome to this book which is a result of the international collaboration of eportfolio practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. We are are so grateful for the openness of eportfolio enthusiasts to share their practice; particularly so in this time of uncertainty and complexity caused by the Covid 19 pandemic.

In recent years, it can be seen that ePortfolio practice is finally delivering on its potential to support and indeed transform the student learning experience. Since 2016 it has been considered a High Impact Practice which have been shown to engage students and elevate their performance (Watson et al, 2016). Farrell (2020) states ePortfolio adoption has now become widespread in higher education, a situation that has been facilitated by a global pandemic which forced educators to seek out alternative assessment strategies that could be supported in the online classroom. This may well serve to be the tipping point for this student centered, authentic, and flexible method of assessment.

A previous ebook focused on examples of how ePortfolio could support assessment across many domains and disciplines. This book seeks to harness the collective knowledge and experience of many educators who utilise ePortfolio to support learning activities, placement, professional development and more. We hope that it will serve to spark conversations and explorations of the diversity of ePortfolio practice.

References
Farrell, O. (2020). From Portafoglio to Eportfolio: The Evolution of Portfolio in Higher Education. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1), 19. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.574
Watson, C. E., Kuh, G. D., Rhodes, T., Light, T. P., & Chen, H. L. (2016). ePortfolios–The eleventh high impact practice. International Journal of ePortfolio, 6(2), 65-69.

Foreword

By Tracy Penny Light, President AAEEBL

Welcome to this collaborative ebook exploring the diversity of ePortfolio practices! At AAEEBL, we are often asked to share examples of activities in different disciplines that our members can adapt for their own ePortfolio implementations. It has long been our desire to create a repository of resources that practitioners can learn from, review, adapt, and reuse in their own contexts. At our most recent AAEEBL Annual meeting, we were asked again for such a resource and Board member, Lisa Donaldson, rose to the challenge. This ebook is what we hope is the first of a set of resources created and curated by members of the AAEEBL and Eportfolio Ireland communities to share practices with each other and with the wider ePortfolio community.

Researchers have argued that for ePortfolios to be done well, they should be viewed as a social pedagogy. The practices associated with social pedagogies facilitate “…collaboration and exchange as well as learning-centered connection…” (Eynon & Gambino, 2017, p. 176). Indeed, the contributions here honour that notion as educators generously share their practices and activities with others to foster community learning and connection primarily aimed at assisting others to implement ePortfolios effectively.

Thank you to all the contributors to this collection for sharing your activities, experiences, and lessons learned with the international ePortfolio community – I am sure this resource will be valuable to many practitioners and researchers as they work to deepen learning among their stakeholders.

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to all the educators and ePortfolio enthusiasts in Ireland, the United States, and beyond who generously contributed their ePortfolio based activities and resources to this book.

It was a collaborative effort between the Steering Committee of Eportfolio Ireland and the Board of the Association of Authentic Experiential and Evidence Based Assessment (AAEEBL). We hope this open and collegial sharing of practice will inspire others to explore the many affordances of ePortfolio.

Lisa Donaldson, Dublin City University, January 2022

Lisa Donaldson
Tom Farrelly
Orna Farrell
Karen Buckley
Laura Costelloe

Tracy Penny Light
C. Edward Watson
Helen L. Chen
David Hubert
Kathleen Blake-Yancey
Gail Matthews-DeNatale
Susan Kahn
Kevin Kelly
Terrel Rhodes
Jordi Getman-Eraso
Patsie Polly
Candyce Reynolds
Lisa Donaldson

Introduction

This ebook shares a wide range of exemplars in many different contexts but all with the goal of deepening the student learning experience. Each contribution maintains a consistent format although the processes and end products may be very different.

The At a Glance section should provide a very high level overview of the content of each author's contribution. Each entry contains a description of how the ePortfolio activity was designed and concludes with Lessons Learned and an overall Reflection which we hope will prove illuminating.

21st century skills for HRM students

At a glance

What was the challenge?

Roisin Donnelly & Ann Masterson, Technological University Dublin
roisin.donnelly@tudublin.ie, ann.masterson@tudublin.ie

B.Sc. & M.Sc Human Resource Management | Full-time & Part-time | 250 students | Blended | Brightspace

The School of Management in the Technological University of Dublin are amalgamating a full-time (FT) and part-time (PT) programme offering in Human Resource Management (HRM), where the FT cohort have a 30 credit work placement. The programme team are proposing to utilise an ePortfolio for both the part time and full time learners to capture their individual professional development throughout the programme and position them for the future with the ePortfolio showcasing 21st century skills for all HRM students

The Human Resource Management (HRM) programme in the School of Management in the Technological University of Dublin is undergoing a full redesign in 2021-22. For the programme team, this work offers an opportunity to consider an ePortfolio as part of larger curricular revisions, and to explore how to embed the use of an ePortfolio at the core of the UG and PG student experience. The current redesign involves amalgamating a full-time (FT) and part-time (PT) programme in Human Resource Management (HRM), where the FT cohort have a 30 credit work placement, and it is an opportune time to consider the integration of an ePortfolio to capture their individual professional development throughout the programme and for the placement in particular. This challenge presents an opportunity to look at the Programme Learning Outcomes (PLOs) and the assessment strategy for the redesigned HRM programme and explore whether an ePortfolio is an effective vehicle for evidence-gathering and reflection by UG students in relation to their learning from their work placement and modules (both horizontally across the programme and vertically from first year-final year; Fig 1) and as a means to have an evidence-base for PGs students seeking employment.

21st century skills for HRM students

How was the activity designed?

It is important that this is designed as a collaborative integrated activity involving the programme team, with feedback from students and alumni. FT students can undertake it as part of their work placement output. PT will be an ongoing piece - spanning the 3 years of their programme, with the aim of enhancing skills development and enabling students’ employability prospects. In year 4 of the programme, the focus will be on supporting project and time management, engagement with external partners and HRM industry, developing transversal and research skills.

The conceptual framework for designing a programme-wide ePortfolio approach is shown in Figure 2. The work is informed by findings from Donnelly et al. (2020) which suggest that final year students could clearly identify the development of skills, knowledge and competencies for the workplace through an internship/work placement and also highlighted was value in undertaking a dissertation for researching a topic of personal interest. Having appropriate levels and different types of support for students facing the challenges in final year was a significant outcome in that study. A model emerged for final year support in three contexts which will be interesting to explore for the HRM ePortfolio: pedagogic, workplace and research, with the need for ‘cohesion’ workshops to be integrated to final year to synthesise student learning, embedding a formalised support structure in order for students to have a greater understanding of choices available to them post-graduation, and introducing a scaffolded approach to ePortfolio development to encourage innovation.

Going forward, discussions with the HRM programme team will focus on how to design and integrate learning activities for ePortfolios, how to support the learning activities with authentic assessment that then contributes as evidence for collection and inclusion in ePortfolios, and how to assess ePortfolios using rubrics.

21st century skills for HRM students

Reflection

We will reflect on the planning and design process as a collaborative exercise and a current focus is to reflect on the ePortfolio integration to the HRM programme to ascertain how best to:

* challenge students to revisit their work on each module within their HRM programme based on the feedback they receive across modules;
*help students develop a holistic, analytic picture of the ‘ground covered’ on the programme;
*cultivate a stronger sense of the HRM discipline and the ways in which themes relate to one another and to the student’s own identity and values;
*enable students to articulate explicitly their own perspectives and skills underpinning the range of disciplinary work showcased;
*create spaces across the HRM programme where students select, curate and gather their best work in line with programme-level learning outcomes so that their output will be a presentation of the practical application of their ideas and discussion of their practice and process 'live' to an industry audience – and they can share their ‘showcase’ ePortfolio which brings in theoretical dimensions to their work. It would include a curated collection of outputs from across the programme which are framed within a substantive intellectual, analytical, connective narrative. This analytical, yet personal narrative would have a disciplinary spirit in content e.g. using a substantive new theoretical or professional framing in supporting people and management practice.
* support students as they develop the reflective skills of discovering themes and patterns in their own work, analyzing their experiences, and making connections across the artefacts they develop.

Creating Geographical Digital Stories with ePortfolio

At a glance

What was the challenge?

Anne Dolan, Mary Immaculate College
anne.dolan@mic.ul.ie

B.Ed. Primary Education | Full-time | 25-30 students | Mahara

ePortfolios provide an opportunity for students to record and share their personal and professional stories. Digital artefacts recorded in an ePortfolio, mark important points of learning along the professional development journey of students. In this module, students were asked to create a geographical digital story artefact as one component in their digital ePortfolios.

Humans are essentially story tellers. Storytelling is regularly used to inform, to entertain, and to educate. More recently, social media has become a powerful platform for story tellers. This initiative, teaching geography through digital stories, is designed to develop my research work further by encouraging students to appreciate their own innate creativity, to engage creatively with story and to create their own digital story artefacts.

Many student teachers have traditional concepts of primary geography based on their own previous experiences. Their experiences of working with digital resources for teaching geography are limited. While student teachers create their own digital material on a daily basis (through Tik Tok, Snapchat and other social media) they do not see the link between these activities and the potential for geographical teaching and learning. By creating digital resources for sharing geographical stories and engaging in geographical storytelling, students will be enabled to deliver primary geography in a creative, innovative fashion.

Creating Geographical Digital Stories with ePortfolio

How was the assignment designed?

A geographical digital story artefacts is any digital resource created by student teachers or children to enable them to communicate a geographical theme or issue. The creation of digital story artefacts is designed to enhance geographical creativity and imagination. It is also an important 21st century skill. For many students in my class, it is the first step in the creation of an eportfolio.

During the first stage of the process students had an opportunity to reflect on their own personal stories and identity through a range of creative approaches such as poetry, digital identity boxes, cartoons, music and story telling. Geography is itself a creative endeavour and the potential to teach geography creatively is endless. ePortfolios allow students to reflect on their own identity and to share their geographical journeys.

Students completed workshops in art, poetry, creative storytelling and digital recording . The structure and content of the initiative needed to be flexible with effective supports to guide and promote student success. Strategic interventions (workshops, feedback and group critics) catered for diverse student needs. Within the feedback sessions and workshops, students were introduced to artistic modes of communication, digital archiving and geographical story telling. In the final stage of the initiative, students created their own geographical digital artefact for their ePortfolios.