E-portfolio-based learning: a practitioner perspective

Julie Hughes, Principal Lecturer in Learning and Teaching, University of Wolverhampton

Abstract

The learning potential for e-portfolios is rapidly attracting attention in higher education. A recent JISC (2008: 5) publication on the effective use of e-portfolios stated that there was an indication from research and practice that the ‘use of these tools can promote more profound forms of learning’. This article will reflect upon how e-portfolio-based learning might be introduced and integrated into the curriculum. It will also consider the practical and pedagogic challenges of building e-portfolio-based learning and teaching capacity in students and staff in a school of education in a teaching intensive post-1992 UK university.

Key words:

e-portfolio, learning potential, building capacity

Why e-portfolio?

In 2004, I was invited to be involved in a pilot e-portfolio project in the School of Education at the University of Wolverhampton. I had worked with traditional paper-based portfolios in teacher education and training contexts for many years. I felt ready to engage with this emergent technology as I perceived the project to be a safe risk supported by a mentor I trusted. This supportive and mentored risk-taking is a model that I have used in successive years to support students and colleagues across the School of Education’s partnership. I was not, at this stage, experienced in using technology to support learning, and I would rate my previous technology skills as limited. I was digitally inexperienced but not digitally reluctant (Hartley et al. 2008). However, I had been given the opportunity in the previous year to attend a centrally funded technology retreat, and I had developed a VLE (virtual learning environment) topic – of which I felt quite proud at the time. Looking back, I can see that my use of technology at this point was little more than information push, albeit in a personalised and welcoming manner. I was, as Laurillard (2007: xv–xvi) identifies, simply and uncritically using ‘technology to support traditional modes of teaching [which were] nowhere near being transformational’.

I felt constrained by the structure of the VLE, and my limited technical knowledge did not allow me to be more creative and experimental as I tried to be in my face-to-face classrooms. Also, I didn’t have access to examples or models of creative and innovative use of the institutional VLE in 2004 and could not at that stage imagine how to ‘reclaim’ the digital space for collaborative and dialogic learning and teaching. My plan, therefore, was to ‘test’ if my face-to-face teaching practices and pedagogy could be transferred to a different digital context and to explore how the use of this newly available e-portfolio environment might enhance the learning experiences of the new teachers I was working with. The platform used, which was at this stage still under development, was PebblePad (www.pebblepad.co.uk). What appealed to me immediately was the student-owned nature of this space which could be personalised. I was aware of just how much reflective critical incident sharing was taking place on MSN within paper-portfolio groups, and I wanted to harness some of this. Of course, PebblePad was still an institutional tool, and access was granted through membership of a gated academic community. Four years later, the product has developed and improved in response to regional, national and international user feedback, and it is, in some ways, almost unrecognisable as the same product that myself and my PGCE (postgraduate certificate in education) group piloted four years ago. What has stayed the same is that it was always the pedagogy and not the technology that led in its implementation in curriculum. We are now in a position in the School of Education at the University of Wolverhampton to be able to claim that we have begun to embed not simply the technology within specific programs but also that dialogic teaching and learning cultures and practices are being adopted because of the modelling of team-based e-portfolio-based learning and teaching (Hughes, Lacey and Wise 2008; Hughes, Lacey and Purnell forthcoming). It is the development and cascading of an e-portfolio pedagogy which will be the main focus of this article.

Context for e-portfolios

The drivers for the development of e-portfolio software are well documented elsewhere (Beetham 2005; Ward and Richardson 2005; Richardson and Ward 2005). E-portfolio as a product emerged at a point when many UK higher education institutions were looking for a solution to the PDP (Personal Development Planning) challenge to meet the 2005 QAA (Quality Assurance Agency) deadline for implementation. In teacher education, the need was less pressing as professional courses already required the ‘evidencing’ of reflection and action planning to meet the professional standards. However, the danger with these established PDP activities is that they can be reduced to a form of performativity and that the reflection evidenced is more an act of review and report (Clegg 2004, 2005). As a paper portfolio assessor, I had engaged in formative feedback like many of my colleagues. I had also developed the use of dialogue journals in a paper format (Hughes 2005) whereby the group – and this included me as tutor – wrote and shared journals detailing the critical incidents of their week in practice. The group then wrote back to, onto and into the reflections of their peers to prompt future reflections. This proved to be a highly reflective activity, which the students stated to be beneficial in terms of developing their reflective writing and sense of self as developing teachers. This was one of the key areas I wished to build upon using the e-portfolio technology as I imagined PDP activities based around narrative, situated practices and community. The potential technology risk, therefore, was somewhat reduced because I felt confident in structuring collaborative reflective writing in groups. This is perhaps the first lesson learnt: consider the risk and the time that it will take to manage the risk before engaging with the new technology. New pedagogy, new module, new technology = high risk. This was new technology, known module, perceived same pedagogy = less risk.

Situating e-portfolio work

Yancey (1997: 4) writing about developmental portfolios in the USA identified that, ‘classrooms hospitable to portfolios center on partnership and collaboration; they foster active construction of knowledge, student reflection and self-evaluation, and community structures in which students and teachers work together as readers, writers, thinkers, researchers and learners.’

This was certainly the philosophy; perhaps idealism underpinned and influenced my intentions and aspirations. I had, however, had previous experiences, as a teacher and as an NVQ (National Vocational Qualification) trainer in further education, of prescriptive and mechanistic evidencing of competences within a portfolio. I was aware that my students and colleagues may also have had this earlier portfolio learning experience, and I wanted to explore the online potential for e-portfolios to ‘evidence’ far richer multi-layered iterative stories of learning (Sutherland 2005) and of personal and professional development. Barrett (2005) has described the e-portfolio as story as a metaphor, and her work has explored the tensions of utilising an e-portfolio for assessment for learning and for assessment of learning (Barrett and Carney 2005). Any e-portfolio use and research must acknowledge and address this tension, and the development of ideas, theories and practices during the past decade illustrates the contested nature of what an e-portfolio is and what it is for. For it is ‘just a presentation. It is nothing more than an e-collection of stuff. The folio is the bit which suggests that it has been put together for a specific purpose’ (Sutherland 2007), which also has the potential to be a personal learning space.

Second lesson learnt: consider what e-portfolio means to you and does it mean the same as it does to your colleagues or institution? At one end of the continuum, it is an engaging presentation tool, a digital ring-binder without interactivity. This type of e-portfolio requires limited support and teacher intervention beyond developing the skills required of the learner to navigate the technology. The assessor and audience should feel a sense of familiarity and order as the digitised form conforms to paper-based norms. At its other extreme, an e-portfolio is a hypertext, montage representation of juxtapositioning and superimposition (Denzin and Lincoln 2005: 5). This representation presumes and demands an active audience able to negotiate the non-linear format. However, this is not to suggest that this form is without internal order. For it to succeed, it must have an awareness of its audience(s). A third lesson: we need to educate the audience(s) too. An assessor, moderator or external examiner new to e-portfolio may not find the evidence without support and instructions. As Laurillard (in Conole and Oliver 2007: 48) warns in her critique of the impact of policy and funding, ‘we scarcely have the infrastructure, the training, the habits or the access to the new technology, to be optimising its use just yet.’

The recent JISC publication, however has a different emphasis, and claims that an emerging consensus defines an e-portfolio as 'the product, created by the learner, a collection of digital artefacts articulating experiences, achievements and learning’ (2008: 6). The emphasis upon learner construction, selection and representation is vital. Cambridge’s work is pushing the field forward with his assertion that e-portfolios are ‘a genre and a set of practices supported by a set of technologies’ (2008). The genre of representation involves ‘collecting evidence in authentic activity, reflecting upon that evidence and interacting with feedback, re-contextualising and reassembling this within an interpretative framework and a set of tools’ (Cambridge 2008). As I enter my fifth year as an e-portfolio practitioner, this definition resonates with me as the set of learning and teaching practices afforded by the inclusion of a collaborative digital dimension within my teacher’s tool kit repertoire grows in complexity and depth over time and changes as its users find new ways to represent themselves. I am learning how to be an e-portfolio teacher by being an e-portfolio teacher and by learning from my learners and their stories told in multimedia format. The representation of self, or stories of self, told in a particular aggregation of artefacts is in constant flux and a constant becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) as learners may draw on and add to their digital asset store ongoing and not only at a fixed point for summative assessment. E-portfolio-based learning and teaching make this journey more explicit when shared with an audience. However more fundamentally, the iterative archiving and networking opportunities suggest a challenge to more traditional models of learning and teaching as the emphasis is less upon the evidence per se as in earlier paper portfolios but is more upon the rationale, or narrative, that links the re-contextualised and reassembled evidence.

A warning and the fourth lesson learnt: one size does not fit all, and the exact nature of the blend should be carefully linked to context. E-portfolios do offer access to rich representations of self if the user has the skills, the infrastructure and access to the technology. Many of our students carry sophisticated technologies in their pockets which could be used to create digital stories, MP3 files and videos, for example. But some students do not have the tools, training or habits and need to be given access and time to develop this. Have you factored this into your use of e-portfolio-based learning?

Growth as a practitioner/researcher

At the end of the pilot year using the e-portfolio, I was invited along with my student Jane Edwards (Edwards 2005) to talk about our experiences at a Centre for Recording Achievement (CRA) event in London. This established a pattern of collaboration, and I have since presented with and written with my students (Hughes and Purnell 2008) as well as encouraging them to write about their e-portfolio learning experiences (Edwards 2005; Jepson and Wright 2006; Karim-Akhtar et al. 2006). Simultaneously, JISC-funded projects were exploring learners’ perceptions of technology, LEX (Creanor et al. 2006) and LXP (Conole et al. 2006), and my work found a theoretical framework which has allowed me to explore e-portfolio practices as open-ended, in-depth ethnographic interviews (Hulme and Hughes 2006; Hughes 2008). To revisit Yancey’s model, I have actively encouraged students to construct and deconstruct their own stories of learning and from practice in response to the feedback from tutor and peers and in light of their wider reading and research. Beetham and Sharpe (2007: 3) urge us as practitioners to acknowledge that ‘pedagogy needs to be “re-done” at the same time as it needs to be “re-thought”’ in a digital age. In the JISC publication, Effective Practice with e-Portfolios, a model of e-portfolio-based learning positions dialogue as central to the learning experience (2008: 9). This is, in my opinion as an e-mentor, the single biggest pedagogic challenge in higher education if we are to harness the potential in Web 2.0 technologies such as e-portfolio to develop ‘talking’ rather than ‘telling’ teaching and learning cultures as so many of our assessment regimes are linked to summative essay submission with little or no focus or value placed upon the formative process activity. E-portfolio based-learning is emerging as a powerful, cumulative and iterative challenge to earlier summative norms.

A fifth lesson learnt: if this is a shift to a dialogue-based model of learning and teaching, then time must be allowed for online orientation, socialisation and rapport-building – for both staff and students. Online communities don’t just happen: they have to be nurtured and supported, and this may need a shift in focus in terms of student contact time. Colleagues new to online learning need to be supported to move from a use of e-portfolio, which is on top of their face-to-face teaching, to a model where it is used instead of the face-to-face content – therefore embedded in the curriculum. In my mentoring role in the past, this has caused some disquiet as some colleagues mourn the loss of the face-to-face initially until they can see the benefit of the online community work. PebblePad contains a blogging tool which has been central to my work for the past three years. In all modules and at all levels from foundation degree to masters level, students have created individual blogs which are shared initially individually with the tutor. Once individual blogging is established, group blogging is introduced and is carefully structured at first with a series of relevant posts designed to engage and prompt responses. Blog writing, both individual and in a group situation, is viewed as a rehearsal or ‘warm up’ for later pieces of academic writing, functioning like Winter’s and Winter et al’s patchwork texts (1999, 2003) which:

'do have a linear development not unlike that of a narrative or an argument or a report, but they have to be read in a slightly different way, because they also have a ‘radial’ structure, not just moving forwards but working outwards from an initial point, assembling and editing together a variety of contrasting material, surveying a circular horizon of meaning in different directions. In other words, each piece makes its own point, as well as contributing to the whole, and the writers commentaries are just that – commentaries: even when they are placed at the end they don’t (necessarily or fully) form a conclusion and sum up everything which has gone before.' (Winter et al. 1999: 68)

This approach requires a shift from summative feedback to ongoing formative feedback and the facilitation of what Lillis (2001) describes as talkback rather than feedback. In this way, the addressivity of the writing and blogging shifts from the practice of the singular and monologic feedback of the tutor to a collaborative and dialogic engagement with the wider writing and blogging community. At the point of summative assessment, the selection and patchworking process can be made explicit through using an e-portfolio medium. The use of this approach has supported Foundation Degree students in their transition into the university, and its attendant literacy practices, and in the transition or handover between modules, tutors and years. It has also been used to support PGCE M Level students into collaborative critical incident sharing, which is then built into a summative presentation (text or multimedia) of their development as reflective practitioners.

A sixth lesson: one size does not fit all (again). Blending the use of e-portfolio must be sensitive to learning, teaching and assessment contexts. Some colleagues cannot imagine initially how an e-portfolio can be measured or assessed against a traditional paper assignment, and issues of equivalency need to be debated. It is important not to be seduced by what might appear to be style or new genre over substance and to return to the module or programme outcomes as the guiding principles to begin the debate.

It is also important at this point to return to the idea of reflection and reflective learning, which is so often coupled unproblematically with the term e-portfolio. Reflection is difficult. Yancey’s (1998: 20) articulation of reflection as both process and product problematises what this might mean in practice as, ‘while many of us advocate student-centred pedagogy, we are still struggling to see how to get the student into that center.’ Recent work in the International Coalition for e-Portfolio Research III (INCEPR) (http://www.ncepr.org), of which this work is a case study, have explored Yancey’s claims that:

'through reflection, we understand curriculum pluralized: as lived, as delivered, as experienced: it is in the intersection of these curricula that identities are formed: students exert the most authority in that intersection since they are the ones who inhabit the place; learning more about that place is a goal of reflection used for educational purposes.' (Yancey 1998: 202)

At a recent meeting of the coalition in July 2008, we were asked in small groups to conceptualise what integrative learning, encompassing Yancey’s pluralised curricula, might look like in relation to e-portfolio learning. We were guided in this activity by the framework developed by Cambridge (forthcoming 2008), the co-founder and co-chair of the coalition whose model drew upon the question asked by Yancey, ‘What kind of selves do our digital portfolio models invite from students?’ and Cambridge’s articulation of the possibility that our learners might inhabit digital ‘network and symphonic identities’ supported in part by Web 2.0 tools and activities. The School of Education’s response to this was to draw upon a pre-meeting activity which asked for a working definition of integrative learning. So, in our case study, it is as much about encouraging the integration of the parts that make up the person without making use of the term ‘the whole person’ as it is about how we encourage and value the representations of these multiple selves – student, worker, family member, community member, etc. Integrative learning is also rooted in the ongoing narrativising through blogging which is conceived as iterative and rhizomatic (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) in its connectivity and internal coherence for an individual. It is vital that the learning is ‘owned’ by the student rather than the institution and that key drivers for the use of e-portfolio are the genre principles outlined by Cambridge. What is an interesting development in the UK context is the recent CRA definition of the e-portfolio domain as a broad one which is, or which might be (2008). It is the what ‘might be’ which is so exciting for future e-portfolio developments.

Successes: what we did

Between 2005 and 2007, there was slow growth in the use of e-portfolios in the School of Education to support the types of e-portfolio-based learning outlined above. At this stage, the implementation and drivers were individuals with an interest in enhancement rather than curriculum or strategic interventions at school or university level. Thanks to a National Teaching Fellowship fund, I was able to grow and employ post-graduation PGCE students over two years to support the development of an e-portfolio culture in the school. This ‘grow your own’ approach has proved invaluable for the university as a whole as both of the former students now work full-time on blended learning initiatives in a central unit, the Institute for Learning Enhancement, supporting staff across the university. In the school, the need to support staff in their use of technology was growing in importance, and a part-time e-learning coordinator was appointed. However, there was limited debate at module or programme level about how the small-scale case-study evidence from the coalition work might be cascaded across larger programmes. In 2007, the decision was made during the revalidation of the PGCE for the post-compulsory sector to embed e-portfolio and critical-incident sharing as outlined above. Simultaneously, the foundation degree teams in early years services and supporting inclusive practice attended a School of Education-funded technology retreat, and both pathways have been revalidated with e-portfolio-based learning as a central activity.

The Higher Education Academy funded cross-university Pathfinder Project (2007–8) on ePDP supported two members of the primary team in their use of e-portfolio, and this has been embedded within a B.Ed. first-year module. The Institute for Learning’s (IfL) adoption of an e-portfolio application (REfLECT – the IfL version of PebblePad) for professional formation for all new teachers in the post-compulsory sector has advanced the plans for the embedding of PebblePad in the Certificate of Education in on-site provision and in ten partner colleges. We have been able to respond to these initiatives because I am seconded to the university’s CETL/CIEL (Critical Interventions to Enhance Learning). There is other smaller scale activity ongoing which it is hoped will be developed across module/programme teams in future years. Where there have been larger scale successes, it is because of a whole-team approach and buy-in. The PGCE and Certificate in Education activity will impact on at least 300 students and 50 teacher education staff and mentors this year and 150 foundation degree students and ten staff. Seventh lesson learnt: working with teams with management buy-in is the only real way to scale up activity.

In all up-scaling activity, capacity-building in colleagues has been a primary driver. As curriculum development and revalidation have driven the larger initiatives, staff were given at least a semester to plan the pedagogic interventions and to be mentored in their technology use. The use of piloting via the INCEPR case study has allowed for evaluation and reflection to inform the next stage. Engagement with coalition theoretical developments has allowed the pedagogy to lead the curriculum redesign with the use of the blogging tool as a central hub for reflections and artefacts from across a programme of study rather than a module attachment. Another important cross-fertilisation from the coalition was the use of pebblePALS, who were trained and supported volunteer peer mentors. Informed by La Guardia Community College’s model of a student-run e-portfolio centre, a group of PGCE students were ‘on duty’ for practical support weekly during the lunch hours in the social learning spaces. This proved to be popular and successful within the cohort and offers a model for development that recognises and draws upon the wealth of knowledge and skills of our e-portfolio learners. Simultaneously, the use of blog buddies was developed to support part-time students in their transition into the university. Year 2 FD students acted as blog buddies or e-mentors to the incoming year. Again, the reception of this student-focused initiative was overwhelmingly positive. Both initiatives are being further developed for this forthcoming year, and there are plans to support this both on-site and off-site in partner colleges through a volunteer group of Year 2 blog buddies. What I am identifying here as the eighth lesson learnt is the possibility of creating cultures in groups of learners that exploits their knowledge of e-portfolio-based learning and collaborative learning for the benefit of the current and incoming year. E-portfolio-based learning is modelled and articulated as cooperative, enquiry-based learning, which wants to, and seeks to, ‘give something back’ to e-portfolio and blogging communities. Grow your own!

Issues

This reads potentially as a great success story for eportfolio-based learning. However, all initiatives outlined above were/are externally funded short-term projects. The work in the School of Education would not have happened at the accelerated pace of the last two years without NTFS funding. Change can be terrifyingly slow in Higher Education, in comparison to Further Education, and technology innovation may be perceived as too high risk in a culture where retention and achievement are the drivers, not innovation and risk-taking to enhance learning. I would like to make the argument that eportfolio-based learning offers a powerful example of how issues such as retention and achievement can be addressed. In the example of the Foundation Degrees grades have improved across the cohorts and progression onto the full degree is growing yearly in the three years since eportfolio-based learning was introduced as a critical intervention. We also have growing evidence in the case study that eportfolio-based learning supports increased student confidence at crucial transition points – entry into year one, between years one and two on the Foundation Degree and from the PGCE into the workplace. Further work is required to explore the variables but we are aware from focus groups, testimonials and evaluations that it is the personalized experience that eportfolio- learning supports that is valued by our learners.

Future directions

We are a new field, and it is exciting. E-portfolio-based learning, teaching and assessment offer us the opportunity to explore the processes of learning with our learners for, ‘it is the processes of learning, the becoming, which may challenge the underlying academic ideology – that of being a something’ (Richardson and St Pierre 2005: 966–7). The creation of montage texts such as e-portfolios and blogs as dialogic texts that ‘presume an active audience [. . .] create spaces for give-and-take between the reader and the writer’ (Denzin and Lincoln 2005: 5). Blair and Takayoshi (1997: 364–6) articulate this as a shift from e-portfolio assessor to ‘user’ for ‘along with the blurring of the acts of writing and reading comes a similar blurring of the dichotomy of process and product.’ So, the tenth lesson learnt, aligning to Mayes and de Freitas’s argument that through the use of the Internet ‘we are beginning to witness a new model of education, rather than a new model of learning’ (2007: 13) is that there are challenging but potentially transformational times ahead for e-portfolio learners and teachers.

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Yancey, K. B. (1998) Reflection in the Writing Classroom, Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press.

The author

Julie Hughes has been exploring how the use of e-portfolios in higher education might support the development of reflexive collaborative learning and teaching cultures. Julie has used the e-portfolio system, PebblePad, since 2004 and has worked with groups of students from foundation degree to masters level in a school of education. Julie has also mentored individual colleagues and teams across the school and the wider partnership to experiment with technology in their teaching. Julie is a National Teaching Fellow (2005) and she is featured in the JISC (2008) publication Effective Practice with e-Portfolios.