ABSTRACT
New challenges and opportunities for assessment have arisen with the increasing complexity of many modern educational environments. This complexity may be in the form of having educational input and assessment from numerous ‘suppliers’, with formal and informal learning often based in multiple locations, and involving a range of different educational and IT infrastructures. The need to develop and support independent lifelong learners capable of formative selfassessment and personal development planning (PDP) represents a further challenge. In this chapter we report on our experiences and lessons learned from developing and implementing electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) for Medicine in relation to these challenges for assessment. Medicine represents a good example of a complex educational environment as students spend much of their time away from the parent institution, and over the duration of the course they are taught and assessed by large numbers of different educators. As such, it provides a good testing ground for ePortfolio approaches to assessment, and many of the lessons learned here are applicable to the wider HE community. At the University of Newcastle ePortfolios were piloted in 2003-4 primarily for formative assessment and for self-assessment purposes. The ePortfolios applied an innovative design to integrate closely with online curricula and virtual learning environments. They provide a means of evidencing the achievement of learning outcomes, and give the learner a personalised view of their accumulating summative assessment results. This type of ePortfolio approach may have an impact on learning pedagogy and assessment: for example, the technology allows learners to share all or parts of their ePortfolio content with assessors, supervisors and peers, who are then able to add formative feedback. The ability of students and assessors to access ePortfolios over the internet from a wide range of different locations is also a key advantage in supporting the recording and evidencing of achievements for formative assessment in complex educational environments.
