ABSTRACT
Within any institution, initiating an e-portfolio project or approach to support student learning, represents new challenges. The idea of implementing student learning e-portfolios, in the personal development sense, presents a number of difficulties and opportunities for any institution. Lorenzo and Ittelson (2005) have presented a comprehensive list of issues that we need to think about. These must be addressed to achieve the full potential of e-portfolios in supporting and enhancing student learning. They include:
Student motivation to maintain an e-portfolio will, to a large extent, be dependent on their understanding of its purpose. How do we ensure that students understand that purpose?
Will the e-portfolio be an official record of a student’s work at subject, programme or institutional level?
Is e-portfolio development an optional activity or a mandatory activity embedded within the course or programme?
How long will the e-portfolio remain at an institution after the student graduates? Institutions will need to think about servers, their maintenance and interoperability issues. For example are e-portfolios to be transferable if a student relocates or changes course?
Who owns the e-portfolio? Does the institution providing the e-portfolio system own certain elements of a student’s archived work, similar to other records or transcripts of student’s achievement? If the e-portfolio is a document management system for archiving course assignments, who owns and controls the access to such documents?
Should anyone other than the student be able to make changes to a student’s e-portfolio?
36How should an institution promote and support the use of e-portfolios? Who is responsible for promoting an e-portfolio culture within a department or within the institution?
Who takes responsibility for developing staff skills and understanding so that they are capable and motivated to support students in e-portfolio development?
How will students’ work be assessed in an e-portfolio context? There will be tensions relating to assessment firstly from the point of view of staff conceptions of validity and reliability. There may be concerns over academic integrity in an e-learning environment.
There could be tensions over the scope of the e-portfolio. If it is too prescriptive students may resent the task. If students are encouraged to be innovative and creative about their learning and about the types of artefacts they show to ‘prove’ their learning, there might well be issues over how to assess these, and what to assess.
These are just some of the challenging questions and issues that e-portfolio use raises and they will be explored in this chapter. They need to be considered even when the project is a pilot project in one area of study. There are additional challenges when planning to implement e-portfolio use over a whole course or programme. Some of the challenges will be technical, but the biggest impact will be on the way we think about learning and the assessment, or recording, or uses of learning. The most ambitious challenge would be to introduce an institution-wide commitment to using e-learning and e-portfolios.