Author: Serena Bufton, s.a.bufton@shu.ac.uk

Author: Richard Pountney, r.p.pountney@shu.ac.uk

JISC e-Learning Activity Area: e-Portfolios

Higher Education Academy Subject Centre: Sociology, Anthropology and Politics

This case study illustrates...an effect on learning, an effect on student personal development, student satisfaction with e-learning, innovation in learning and teaching, an influence on educational research, staff satisfaction with e-learning, use of resources

Technology Used

What technologies and/or e-tools were available to you?

The institution is committed to the virtual learning environment (VLE), Blackboard, which has an e-portfolio application. However, the module team agreed that the Blackboard e-portfolio, in its current form, does not fully meet the requirements of the module or degree programme as it has limited functionality and is visually unattractive. We explored the use of open-source, web-based e-portfolio systems but had neither the technical expertise nor time to develop these. Instead, we decided to adopt the PebblePad e-portfolio package, developed and marketed by Wolverhampton University. This tool was chosen because of its pedagogical potential and technical sophistication:

• It is easy to use, visually attractive and inter-operable with other systems; students can take it with them into employment.
• It allows students to undertake group work - for example, to prepare group presentations.
• Work in progress can be shared with others and feedback gained.
• It is owned by the student, who can decide with whom aspects of it are shared.
• Assessment can be prepared and submitted via an assessment 'gateway'; feedback and marks are easily returned to students.
• Work, feedback and reflections can be collected together in one place.
• It encourages students to record thoughts, experiences, abilities and achievements; it supports students to produce action plans and CVs; it has a blog function.
• It allows the preparation of 'webfolios' with hypertext links to 'evidence' in a range of media (documents, film, audio files, web-based sources etc) and therefore has clear potential for PDP.