Group Admins
Description
e-Portfolios are used in higher education to prepare students for lifelong learning, to teach critical thinking and problem solving skills as well as to facilitate student collaboration, peer feedback, and to support authentic assessment approaches (Bolliger and Shepherd, 2010). E-portfolios allow students to build their digital footprint or legacy while at the same time enhancing their digital literacy skills. Students are creating, sharing and remixing information in new ways into new learning and this needs to be captured. Consequently, advanced analytics are required to ascertain types of student interaction/practice with eportfolios to scaffold future use.
This presentation will provide an overview of the aims and proposed outputs from a Hefce Catalyst funded project to improve the analytic reporting tools available within the open source e-portfolio platform Mahara to enable individual academics and institutions to evaluate learner engagement and support academic retention activities. Furthermore utilising these analytics, examples of good learning design emerging from this collaborative project will be shared to inform practice across the sector. All developments emanating from this project will be released freely back to the academic community while all case studies will be shared openly under a Creative Commons licence.
To achieve the best impact from this project and ensure that the project delivers on its stated aims, the project team have sought to openly capture requirements from the wider HE community in order to produce outputs that are beneficial across the sector and encourages wider engagement and collaboration in use of eportfolios in support of student learning and assessment.
Bollinger, D. U. & Shepherd, C. E. (2010). Student perceptions of ePortfolio integration in online courses. Distance Education. 31(3), 295-314.
