ePortfolios

ePortfolios

Dear LTers,

I’m wondering if anyone in our LT team has had experience or exposure to ePortfolio design, development and/or as user.

We have been in touch with an organization interested in developing a missions oriented ePortfolio for Latin American missionaries, as some of you already know.

He has some questions and I desire to get more information before emailing back to him.

They are exploring solutions still before working in details about the need, audience, etc.

I’m attaching an article he sent to me where some of the actual ePorfolio tools are mentioned. The same author of that article published a website with a lot of info around eP.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2010/04/07/eportfolios-finally.aspx

Hi Mauricio,

     Yes, I have been involved with ePortfolios. I taught K-12 and college teachers how to use them and I actually had to develop one for my graduate work. We have talked to several Bible schools about how to do them using Moodle.

     ePortfolios are used to provide evidence of knowledge/skill gains especially toward professional competencies. For my graduate program, the professional association of instructional designers had published a list of about 7 competencies. We had to demonstrate our achievement toward each of those competencies thorough listing the coursework, projects, publications, presentations, etc., that we had done. This was reviewed by our committee and our peers. This ePortfolio was a simple website that we each developed. It became a very powerful resume tool as I looked for jobs after graduation. I moved it over to a CD that I included whenever I submitted a resume. I don’t necessarily recommend doing it this way as there are other important things that an ePortfolio could do (see below).

       Bible schools need a way to keep track of student development as the students progress through the curriculum.

·   There needs to be a way for faculty to record student growth in several dimension and to share that with the other faculty members who may have this student.

·   The student needs to have a place to record his/her thoughts about these milestones.

·   There should be a place to record significant projects and items that the student will need to continue to have access to after they have completed a specific course.

ePortfolios (with different levels of Student/Faculty read/write access) provide for this need.

        Most simply in Moodle, an ePortfolio consists of an individual course per student that only they and their faculty and mentor/advisor have access to. They stay enrolled in this course for the duration of their time with the school. Here the student uploads/records significant projects/papers that they feel demonstrate their work (or are required to provide). Here they keep a journal of their growth. Here each faculty member comments on the student’s growth (or lack thereof) and students can reply back to those comments. All of this becomes part of the permanent record. The next faculty member can review what has been produced for each student so that they know them very well even before the course begins and they know where to challenge and where extra help might be needed. These Portfolios then provide a record of personal, spiritual, and character growth that an academic transcript cannot do.

Special ePortfolio tools may do similar things more easily and also allow for easier transfer into more permanent storage like paper or PDF. I haven’t reviewed any other tools in a long time. What do you think of the plugins for Moodle?

        In conclusion, I highly recommend ePortfolios, but I am not necessarily an advocate of buying extra software to do them. Often the tools we already have can be enough.

Brian