Are e-portfolios better for CPD than other portfolios?

A key goal of higher education (perhaps the key goal?) is to produce graduates who become successful independent learners in their professions. ‘Newly-minted’ graduates have to take the first step, of course: getting a job, or joining a postgraduate programme of study. To do this they need to stand out from the crowd. It is claimed that having a degree isn’t enough and that graduates need to be able to demonstrate their professional competencies:

Figure 1: Professional competencies (GOV.UK, 2010)

Knowledge may be defined as the demonstration of understanding of a topic, technique or concept. Skills can be understood to be practiced applications of knowledge and can be demonstrated when knowledge is applied in practical and intellectual contexts. In many cases, these contexts overlap. It can be argued that experience derives from the extension of skills and knowledge into real-world situations. Many courses in HE embed teamwork and open-ended problem-solving within their programme design, and students are actively encouraged to take part in volunteering activities in order to help develop their professional profiles. So, students are potentially very well-equipped to show the world what they are made of, but unfortunately, they don’t always do so.

Traditionally, ‘telling the world what you can do’ involved the use of a CV, personal statement, and possibly a portfolio of evidence. Although CVs are likely to continue to be important for professional jobs, the importance of e-portfolios for professional development is growing rapidly. The Civil Service ‘no longer accepts CVs for job applications, focussing instead on ‘competencies’ (GOV.UK, A brief guide to competencies, 2016). The largest employer in the country, (the NHS) has a career development framework based entirely on competencies (NHS, 2017). The professional CPD system used by most, if not all, professional bodies, is actually based on competencies. In this ‘new world’, modern software tools offer unprecedented opportunities for students to identify and evidence their professional skills. This leads us to reflect on ‘Mahara’.

Mahara

Mahara is an open-source e-portfolio system developed by New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Commission’s e-learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF) (Mahara, 2011). Mahara is both an e-portfolio and a social networking system. It is based around pages, which can contain a range of artefacts. Users can have many pages, with each containing a variety of artefacts. Pages by default are set to be private (in other words, only accessible to their original editor), or they can be shared with individuals or groups through using a ‘secret URL’. Pages can be aggregated into collections, which are sets of linked pages with the same access permissions.

E-portfolios v other portfolios

Portfolios have been used in education for several decades, as part of formative development and summative assessment. They may be defined as ‘a collection of evidence that is gathered together to show a person’s learning journey over time and to demonstrate their abilities’ (Butler, 2007). Traditional physical portfolios usually consist of a large number of documents, collected in ring-binder files. An individual portfolio can be of considerable size and weight, and when a large group submit a collection of portfolios, the volume of the submission is daunting. Finding an individual portfolio, let alone a specific document, can be problematic. Another challenging issue is that in establishing the validity of assessment, the portfolios usually need to be retained for at least a year. This means that students are not able to recover materials that had been handed over.

Electronic documents are intrinsically more accessible, and parts of the student evidence base can be made accessible to potential employers and other outside parties. A significant advantage is that these portfolios are easier to share and update when students work on team projects. E-portfolios have the potential to be ‘real publications’ with an audience much wider than those involved in the academic process of assessment in a particular unit or module of study (Kimball, 2003).

Beyond the e-portfolio

There is more to Mahara than just e-portfolios. Experience of using the system with many students across a range of modules, has demonstrated how useful it can be for other reasons. The authors have used Mahara for the submission and management of assignments, and have had great success in the management of teamwork-based project modules. The benefits and potential issues associated with Mahara will be discussed in future blog posts. The authors will continue to explore the potential to use systems like Mahara to embed employability across curricula.

References

Butler, P. (2007). A review of the literature on portfolios and electronic portfolios. ADM E: Portfolio Literature.
GOV.UK. (2010). Lifecycle skills and competencies. Retrieved from Office of Goverment Commerce (now deleted).
GOV.UK. (2016). A brief guide to competencies. Retrieved from GOV.UK.
Kimball, M. (2003). The web portfolio guide. New York: Longman.
Mahara. (2011). WikiHistory. Retrieved from History.
NHS. (2017). Career and competency frameworks. Retrieved from Health Careers.