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Excellence Gateway
This case study was produced by JISC RSC (Regional Support Centres) East Midlands on behalf of the Excellence Gateway.
Sector relevance: Further education colleges
Keywords: Improving teaching and learning, teaching, training, coaching and learning, e-learning, e-portfolios, reflective practice, diagnostic assessment, e-assessment, information and communication technology
The College has been taking part in an e-portfolio project to see what benefits can be obtained for students and staff. The e-portfolio system chosen was PebblePad and a pilot is currently underway with a variety of subject areas in the College. Initial successes have been in the recording of evidence and in the longer term it is hoped to increase the amount of reflective thinking in the e-portfolios.
South Nottingham College is a general further education college with a range of further and higher education courses and training opportunities for business and industry. It has a mission statement of 'Success Through Learning'.
One of the most talked-about topics in the post-16 education and training sector recently is e-portfolios and how an organisation can use them effectively.
An e-portfolio has been described as:
'a purposeful aggregation of digital items - ideas, evidence, reflections, feedback, etc, which presents a selected audience with evidence of a person's learning and/or ability' (Sutherland, S. and Powell, A. 2007).
Image 1: e-Portfolio diagram - e-portfolios can be used in a wide variety of ways
At South Nottingham College the interest in e-portfolios came from both a top-down and a bottom-up approach. Members of the senior management team had attended a presentation at a regional project and wanted to see if the College could become involved, in the meantime various members of staff had expressed a desire to begin using e-assessment with their students.
The challenge for South Nottingham College was how the introduction of e-portfolios would sit with the other college systems such as (SharePoint) both technically and pedagogically; the effect this might have on devolving decisions down to departments; the ease or complexity of this mixed approach; and the potential impact on learners, tutors and college policy.
The introduction of e-portfolios was also only one a number of projects that the e-learning team had on the go at this time.
South Nottingham decided to become involved in the e-portfolio pilot project through Leap Ahead, organised by the Lifelong Learning Network for Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire and run by staff at the Centre for International ePortfolio Development at the University of Nottingham.
The advantage to the College of this approach was that the pilot was supported by the Leap Ahead/University team; free licences were made available by the e-Portfolio providers; and that knowledge and experience would be available from other learning providers who were taking part in the project both within other colleges and from organisations in different sectors in the region.
The staff at South Nottingham College looked at the two different models of e-portfolio - PebblePad and iwebfolio - that were available within the Leap Ahead project.
After demonstrations and assessment by staff, the decision was taken to work with PebblePad since it appeared user-friendly; had minimum menus and programming; incorporated reflective learning capabilities; and was also the system introduced by the Institute for Learning (IFL) to record Continuing Professional Development (CPD), which would allow staff at the College to gain transferable skills between these systems.
In the pilot phase the e-portfolios have been used across Levels 2,3,4 in the College in these subject areas:
Permission was sought and granted from the Internal Verifiers (IVs) and External Verifiers (EVs) of the courses to electronically assess completed work where appropriate.
Tracey Hardwick, Lecturer on the ICT courses, encourages others to:
“engage with your moderator - you can allow them into the e-portfolio system as a non-member."
At the commencement of the pilot one of the main aims of the e-portfolios was to get students to do reflective thinking. The e-portfolios have only recently been adopted so the amount of examples of reflective thinking is low but it is hoped that it will grow considerably as students get more comfortable with the system.
Linda Wright, Lecturer in Hairdressing, has had feedback from her students and says:
“They like the structure of the input into the e-portfolio. They prefer the fact that there are prompts within it rather than a blank canvas as this assists in their writing and recording of their learning. Also some of the students feel they will continue to use the e-portfolio to maintain and update their CVs as they gain employability skills.”
The PebblePad e-portfolio system is an institution-free platform in that all the software and data is run by an organisation outside of the College.
e-Learning Co-ordinator, Adele Cushing explains that:
“There has generally been a peace of mind about the ability to access the website when maintenance occurs over the weekend. This maintenance work may temporarily disable email or our learning platform which can be disabling to distance or part-time learners and the provision of an additional system for planning and assessment has meant that students can continue to access and develop their work.”
Image 2: Courses list - students like the prompts within the e-portfolio to assist them in their writing and recording of their learning
The students love being able to play and personalise their e-portfolio.
ICT lecturer, Tracy Hardwick, thinks that:
“The ability to personalise the system is key as students have created their own backgrounds and this helps them to make it their own.”
Whilst Bob Tuckwood, lecturer in Multimedia at the College agrees that personalisation is important his students have found limitations:
“As the students on the multimedia courses are generally creative-types the students would have preferred to be able to personalise their e-portfolios more and this has affected their usage of the system.”
Image 3: Menu - students have generally enjoyed being able to personalise the look of their e-portfolios, but some would have preferred more options
There have been several challenges to the introduction of the e-portfolios at South Nottingham College.
Some of the language and terminology used in the system has been difficult for the students. Terms such as 'Assets' have been poorly understood.
Difficulties have arisen over versioning and having to download work to correct it and re-upload. However the convenience of storing work online, saving paper and being able to comment electronically and collaborate comments with IVs and EVs has outweighed the negative concerns.
Challenging questions in regard to e-assessment from some students have been "what's wrong with a USB stick and email?" So there has been a need to change the culture of the students and show them the benefits of using the e-portfolios.
Some of the students do not have a computer or internet at home, which can limit the adoption of the e-portfolios.
There have been some reports with access issues, particularly from outside the College. There is no special code or domain name that needs to be part of the login process but there have still been complaints from some students that they can't login from home, which was surprising considering the ease of use internally. Access via a separate URL (web address) rather than 'googling' the address has also been observed as an unnatural way for young (digital native) students to work. It is difficult for any organisation to support remote learning since each remote user's computer is different from the next.
In addition the e-portfolio chosen by the majority of staff participating in the pilot was originally not suitable for the requirements of the work-based learning students. They required a simple method of cross-referencing NVQ criteria with evidence and PebblePad does not easily provide this. There is a ‘Proforma' option but this would still require time set aside by the lecturer or student to input the criteria first in order to cross reference shthe evidence that meets it. Some students who had been using a basic e-portfolio hyperlinking method therefore found it difficult to adapt to PebblePad as they couldn't see a way this system would support them as much as the more basic system did.
However after some additional research and additional staff training that it has proven possible for work-based learners to use the e-portfolio through the webfolio asset which will link all students work into a professional looking website. This can then be shared online through a uniquely created URL.
According to Adele:
“What has become apparent from the pilot so far is that personalisation is key. One size of e-portfolio does not fit all! Different staff and students require different elements. Pebblepad has a good basic ‘skeleton' but it would be ideal for users to be able to further adapt and create the look of their e-portfolio beyond mere font and colour changes. This would include the ability to cross reference as well as the ability to upload mobile recorded evidence directly. “There is a mobile application called Shozu which enables mobile footage to be posted directly to applications like Facebook. We thought it would be ideal if this could be adapted within e-portfolio systems such as Pebblepad, Following a meeting with them they've agreed to look into the development of that and generally they've been very responsive to the feedback that we've given to them.”
“What has become apparent from the pilot so far is that personalisation is key. One size of e-portfolio does not fit all! Different staff and students require different elements. Pebblepad has a good basic ‘skeleton' but it would be ideal for users to be able to further adapt and create the look of their e-portfolio beyond mere font and colour changes. This would include the ability to cross reference as well as the ability to upload mobile recorded evidence directly.
“There is a mobile application called Shozu which enables mobile footage to be posted directly to applications like Facebook. We thought it would be ideal if this could be adapted within e-portfolio systems such as Pebblepad, Following a meeting with them they've agreed to look into the development of that and generally they've been very responsive to the feedback that we've given to them.”
South Nottingham College will continue to experiment with the PebblePad e-portfolios. The Leap Ahead project continues until December 2009.
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