At last week's ALT-SURF conference on digital repositories and ePortfolios there was interesting and contrasting ePortfolio presentations from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Newcastle, and Utrecht University/University of Maastricht. Read on if you want to know more. The context for Edinburgh's ePortfolio is medical education and because it has been around since 1998 it is much more embedded than Newcastle system; the latter is currently being trialed on ~200 students. Edinburgh has ~1300 ePortfolio users which equates to around one million page views per month with around 16,000 items stored in its ePortfolios.
Edinburgh stores its portfolio entries in the print-oriented PDF format which reflects perhaps the professional body expectations (General Medica Council directives 1993 & 2002) and, therefore, the apparently centrally-driven/highly-directive nature of their solution, e.g. tracking, fixed submission dates and times, one-time uploads etc.
Newcastle's initiative is a FDTL4 funded project. I particularly liked the way Newcastle's ePortfolio system enabled a portfolio owner to allow other specified users to view specified content elements of the owner's portfolio.
In all cases the ePortfolio seems to be viewed as an important part of the independent pole of a didactic > independent continuum and is viewed as a framework provided by the institution which needs to be 'seeded' by students. All the presentations emphasized the importance of 'constructive alignment', i.e. ensuring that the learning outcomes, assessment processes, activities, events, and resources fit together in way that is likely to help, and not hinder, learning. The Utrecht University/Maastricht presentation illustrated this particularly clearly with goals as the nucleus surrounded by learning activities which in turn were surrounded by the learning environment. The aim being to move the learner through a hierarchy of 'knows' > 'knows how' > 'shows' > 'does'.
In the next article in this sequence I'll consider some of the issues and challenges that the introduction of ePortfolios may present us with.
