Success Factors
What are the key outcomes of the initiative?
The key tangible outcome is a DVD of video interviews with practitioners talking about their use of an e-portfolio for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) of staff. The DVD was made available for distribution across the HE sector including the Emerge community and attendees at the Flourish/e-PIP workshop of 2009.
The practitioners featured on the video interviews are drawn from HE institutions across the UK:
- Susi Peacock at Queen Margaret's University, Edinburgh
- Phil Vincent at York St John's University
- Neil Currant at Bradford University
- David Eddy at Sheffield Hallam University
The video case studies conducted demonstrate a broad view of the use of e-portfolios for CPD in higher education; viewers of the project outputs should be able to build an informed perspective of current use of e-portfolios for CPD based upon the collection of testimonies collected.
The video case studies have also been made available online.
An additional benefit of Blossom is that it has allowed Flourish room to reflect on its progress and impact internally and has also helped in the dissemination of work and findings to a wider audience.
What follow-up activity will be/has been carried out as a result of the project?
e-Portfolio use for CPD is not yet widespread across the Higher Education sector. Further work in this area investigating how e-portfolios are used would be of benefit to the HE sector. This project has provided a great insight into the use of e-portfolios for staff development and the video case studies go some way to highlighting current practices and innovations within selected Higher Education institutions of the use of e-portfolios for CPD. Application of lessons learned from Blossom is ongoing in future work on the use of e-portfolios for CPD.
Blossom has directly affected other project work at the University of Cumbria, particularly the Flourish work, and has impacted on many aspects of this, staff engagement, practical issues and staff training.
Future work for this project includes continuing the relationship with the partners involved in order to maintain contact and share useful advice and good practice.
In addition, it would be useful to have an up-to-date online area where practitioners and the other stakeholders could contribute or search for information about the current state of e-portfolio use for CPD across the sector. This is an emergent area with a need for professional bodies and practitioners to have good case studies to refer to when making their own decisions.
Video case studies will be available online for three years, hosted by the University of Cumbria's streaming media server. DVD copies are also available allowing for a longer term, durable and offline output of the project to be accessed.
