How can we use ePortfolios to help students reflect upon and improve their learning?

2B: Teaching and Learning PanelHow can we use ePortfolios to help students

reflect upon and improve their learning?

Helen L. Chen, Glenn Johnson, and Darren Cambridge

ePortfolios West Coast SummitFebruary 25, 2009, San Francisco, CA

What do we mean by learning?

Reflective Learning

Integrative Learning

Lifelong Learning

Evidence of learning?

1. What artifacts might be included in this ePortfolio?

2. From these ePortfolio artifacts, what can we tangibly see about a student’s learning that we couldn’t see before?

3. What does this ePortfolio tell you about the student’s process of learning?

4. What does this ePortfolio tell you about the course experience – content, activities, teaching, department experience, learning environment?

Folio Thinking

The reflective practice of creating learning portfolios by providing structured opportunities for students to:

• create learning portfolios• reflect on learning experiences

Enable students to:• integrate and synthesize learning• enhance self-understanding • make deliberate choices in their learning career• develop an intellectual identity

Scaffolding the Reflection Process

• Weekly posting requirements:– 2 Input Captures– 2 Immediate Reflections– 2 Broad Takeaways (at the end of the design

cycle)

• Required weekly comment on another student’s idea log

• Taboo List of Phrases – The Clichés of Reflection

Individual Tasks• “very productive”• “insightful”• “interesting”• “put my creativity to the

test”• “I learned so much”• “we needed more time”

Group Work• “different perspectives

and ideas”• “workload was divided

evenly”• “everyone worked well

together”• “two heads are better

than one”

Taboo Phrases

Student Artifacts of Learning

“On a different subject, I am still in the dark on what exactly we are supposed to be doing for this next iLoft project. I feel so unproductive and confused - I just want to get instructions and to get started designing something! I am a techie! I don't get all this reflection stuff! That's all for now! Later wiki page!”

IUPUI Preflection Questions

• What are your important goals for your life after college? Think about your goals in areas like career, citizenship, relationships, personal life, and spiritual/religious development.

• Thinking of one or two of these goals, what do you need to do and learn between now and graduation to get there? What abilities, skills, knowledge, and other characteristics do you need to improve or develop?

• Which of the PULs seem(s) most important for you to improve upon to reach your goals? Why?

IUPUI Reflection Questions

• Reflect upon the goals you had during your first weeks at IUPUI.

• Have your goals, or your ideas about how to reach them, changed?

• What have you learned that is relevant to the goal(s) discussed in your preflection? What is the evidence for this learning?

• Are there additional PULs that you now see as relevant to your goals?

St. Olaf College – Center for Integrative StudiesDevelopment Studies: Socio-economic

Development from an Interdisciplinary Perspective

“Finding the Thread in My Life”

Environments for Growth

• In both personal and professional domains– Learning as attitude toward life– Supported by inviting

environments rich in content and people

– Technology as a means to guide and support

• Communicated by the portfolios as a whole

• Can inform her profession

I think it'd be difficult to separate completely, you know, who I am and what my immediate family loves are versus just me as a professional educator and nurse. … I am not someone who's isolated to the world of professional nursing education. I also have conflicting, or competing maybe, obligations within my life that I need to balance, just as students do and other professionals do, and I think that that's a good thing, to show … people that are reading my sites, I have other obligations in my life, and I manage to hopefully balance them all and be able to perform to the best of my ability in all those domains.

Tracy

Corrosion of Character

• Work and identity in the new capitalism

• Interviewed diverse US workers

• Moral values of long-term commitments and enduring relationships

• Alignment of the personal and professional

From Subject to Author

• Ordering role of institutions and traditions shifted to individual

• From being our values, relationships, and experiences to having them

• Overarching principles that mediate competition

• Thinking about the self as a system you compose and conduct

Integrity

• Values, commitments, and actions cohere and interconnect

• Across personal, professional, and civic roles• Over time• Made consistent to a systemic understanding

of identity

Network SelfCreating intentional connections

Symphonic SelfAchieving integrity of the whole