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Effective e-Portfolio use at Aston University

Connecting the Eportfolio Community : Copyright Alison Miller

In this blog post I report on two different uses of e-portfolios (PebblePad) here at Aston University.  Both have similar stories to tell, in respect of the methods the academic staff have used to scaffold and support student’s reflective evidence, and their methods of teaching critical reflective writing. Finally we ask the question of how they assess reflective portfolio evidence.   I should also direct your attention to five new enlightening JISC produced video case studies on e-Portfolio use across UK HE and FE: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/eportimplement .

Now it’s time for a serious look at the new and improved PebblePad 3– following the recent unveiling by the PebblePad team.

Dr Roy Smith: Combined Honours

At our recent Aston e-Portfolio interest group (ae-pig) meeting we had the pleasure of talking to Dr Roy Smith  (former Director of Combined Honours).  Dr Smith was invited to talk about his use of e-portfolios for the combined honours cohorts in recent years.  Dr Smith has been using PebblePad to allow students to build up evidence of skills and competences beginning in year 02.  Students are encouraged and guided (using a template webfolio) to continually reflect upon their experiences. They continually create a body of evidence that displays their development during their undergraduate studies and work placements.

In the initial stages of using PebblePad Dr Smith provided little scaffolding (with Pebblepad), but soon found this to be counter-productive to effective learning and their grasp on the importance of a reflective journal.  The lessons he learned echo others adoption of e-portfolios, namely;

• Provide initial support for the students. This ensured they understood the longer term employability benefits of using an e-Portfolio as a “living” document.
• Use simple scaffolding mechanisms to provide a framework for collated evidence, i.e. webfolio. Dr Smith utilised the skills and competences frameworks provide by our careers department for this purpose.
• Promote and provide effective reflective (academic) writing skills. In his case Dr Smith used the work of Dr Jenny Moon , by running writing workshops.
• Use secure gateways to manage large cohort reflective assessments.
• Add weighted assessment grades to both the live journal and the final CV parts.
• Final assessment of the journal ensured that students displayed evidence of higher order thinking skills, by collating and synthesising critical incidents. The critical reflections on their developing skills and competencies would therefore help guide them in their chosen careers.

Dr Smith concluded his talk by commenting upon another portfolio he implemented for an area of lecturing he covers. This is a paper based portfolio, and is extremely successful with the students recording lab experiments and field tests.  Fitness for purpose is the key here for “technology” or lack of in this instance. Don’t let the technology dictate the learning and teaching.

Whilst discussing the evasive subject of both teaching and assessing reflective writing, Dr Errol Thompson proffered an alternative method of defining assessment criteria; using the depth, width , and journey framework . This utilises the SOLO taxonomy   by Biggs and Collis (1982)

•  See also the International Journal of e-Portfolio (volume 2 number 1) which contains papers covering assessment.

Dr Ann Hartley: The Aston Certificate

At our previous ae-pig meeting in November 2011 we invited along Dr Ann Hartley to discuss how she uses and assesses the reflective aspects of student portfolios for the Aston Certificate:  An Introduction to Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

Recently, this programme has adopted the use of PebblePad to enable students to reflect upon their teaching practice, for both continual and final assessment – using a web based platform.  Dr Hartley has been involved with the Aston Certificate for quite a while now, and has embraced the potential of continual (developmental) and critical reflection afforded by a web based tool such as PebblePad. Read more

Tasty Pi

This UK company is taking the one laptop per child concept to a whole new new level.   RasberryPi.org have developed a tiny Linux powered “PC” for only $25!  Anyone interested in downsizing their PC footprint, or those who teach programming should be very interested in this development. The wearable PC comes closer to reality!

Q:  What’s a Raspberry Pi?

A: “The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video.”

It was due to be available towards the end of February, but they are still tweaking the final product.  Read more here, and pre order it here.

TED’s new addition

I’ve long been a fan of the diverse range of informative and inspiring TED Talks. Today they’ve announced a new member of their family – TED Ed – which will be officially lanching as a YouTube channel in April. The idea is simple – teachers across the educational spectrum can team up with professional animators to share their resources in a short video not exceeding 10 minutes.  As always with TED, the video says it all…

Infecting Academia

This video explains the recent research conducted by Panos Vlachopolous, Kevin Brace (CLIPP), and David Pollard (LSS School).    Essentially academic staff valued both localised and central support, and also used peers to assist their use of technologies.  The results we interesting regarding the varying types and frequency of communications required to reach busy staff here at Aston, or indeed any university.   The need for more localised support mechanisms points towards the potential of nurturing communities of practice, and the importance of subject specific “champions.”

JISC funding- elevated

I noticed a recent article entitled ” How to make your JISC funding bid stand out from the crowd” on the CETIS news pages recently.  I thought it was nigh time that I posted a similar bid writing guide that Christa Appleton (JISC RSC West Midlands) and I crafted last year.  The Aston Research Support Unit have assisted us previously with the (TRAC) costing process of JISC bids – this aspect not to be underestimated!

Along with the above guide, JISC have also announced a new method of bidding for smaller project funds using their Elevator service.  The new service is designed for innovative projects that need to  gain funding up to £10K – without having to adhere to the strict criteria of their usual project funding programmes.

As Martin Hawksey has already Tweeted – it would be useful to see collaborative ideas with students pitching for funds.

Learning platform updates

The vendors of three of our core tools have recently announced product updates. We will be monitoring and testing (some of) these during the forthcoming months; and will report back on progress.

Turnitin2

Two new major updates are currently being planned for later this spring:

1)   Updated Basic integration;

• Upgraded Instructors interface, enabling better tracking and monitoring of all scripts in assignments
• Instructors being able to view any requested matched papers from within their own institution – without needing to contact Tii support
• The ability to attach audio feedback to scripts.

2)   Direct Integration (currently in beta test). Main features;

• Multi-part and continuous assignment types
• e-rater grammar checker
• removal of the roster synch button
• Export grades to Excel format, user un-mapping ability, ability to recycle /rollover old assignments (with new cohorts)
• Releasing grades only on “Post” date
• Improved support for moving assignments.

Read more here: http://submit.ac.uk/en_us/support/integrations/blackboard-direct

Note: some of the features listed above (e.g. audio feedback, or upgraded instructors interface) will be implemented as standard for the web document viewer, so they will ultimately appear in both the direct and basic integrations.

In addition to the above new features on the horizon are;

• A whole new set of analytics tools will be made available to assignment instructors.
• A phased roll out of fully iPad enabled Turnitin access will begin in spring 2012 through to winter 2013.
• Translated paraphrasing will also be available this year. This relatively new method of converting text into different languages – then back into English, can be now be “checked” to detect this practice.

Book your place on the free Turnitin webinars running spring 2012.

Read more

Learning greening

The Greening of ICT is an awareness of the issues associated with the use of IT within the tertiary education sector, i.e. the reduction of sector carbon footprint and associated energy costs (JISC 2009).  Here at Aston, we are running a number of initiatives associated with improving the sustainability of the campus – detailed in the Environment and sustainability web pages.  Also within this website CLIPP explain how the use of virtual classrooms and webinars (using Elluminate) can help with this campus wide push to both improve sustainability and enhance the student experience.

More recently CLIPP assisted Dr John Blewitt to run an entire conference online, covering these very issues.  We used Elluminate in conjunction with Blackboard to create a synchronous online experience, with presenters from across the globe.  The whole event ran very well, and not only show-cased the tools and their potential we have on offer for staff and students to learn “at a distance”, it also demonstrates our on-going commitment to reduce carbon emissions.  Dr Blewitt has since edited the four (video) presentations from the day, and added them to a new website explaining the ideas that underpinned the conference themes.

Turnitin – turnitup!

Turnitin; our text matching tool of choice are currently beta testing two new additions to their ever growing suite of features:

First is the direct integration – useful for those (like us) who have Turnitin fully integrated with their VLE.    We will be joining the beta testing process in the near future. I am attending a demonstration of this next week, and will report back soon.

Secondly is the beta release of translated paraphrasing. This relatively new method of converting text into different languages – then back into English, can be now be “checked” to detect this practice.

Training news

Turnitin are also  running a series awareness sessions running during February and March, covering a wide range of academic misconduct and plagiarism topics. Most are free, and can be attended via an online webinar. Find out more and book onto these here: http://community.turnitin.com/events/event_list.asp

Media and Learning Technologies’ Portfolio

You can now browse all the significant teaching and promotional projects which Media and Learning Technologies (CLIPP’s media service) has produced in the past three years on our Portfolio pages on the Aston University website. There’s a brief summary of each project and what we ended up delivering, as well as links to the video content itself (where possible).

I’m really pleased that we now have this resource as a testimony to what we can achieve, but it’s really just a small part of what we do. With every new project, we’re adapting and developing our skills and knowledge further, to ensure that we continually improve  the creation of high-quality learning and promotional materials which effectively reach their target audiences. Please check the Portfolio pages regularly in the future as I will be adding not only the latest completed projects as we deliver them but also some of the classic work we did between 2004 and 2008, and hopefully even earlier.

Should you need any more information – or have any comments – about any of the projects on the Portfolio pages, then please don’t hesitate to contact me on 0121 204 4232 or at n.w.birch@aston.ac.uk.

Turnitin update

There is a Turnitin update scheduled for Tuesday 24th January that will see changes to the Student homepage for users who access via the website or use our Blackboard integration.

Student Class Homepage

What is the student class homepage?

The student class homepage is the page where students go when they click on the class name in their class list (the class list is the first page they see when they log in). The student class homepage lists the assignments in the class, shows the work the student has submitted, provides access to the feedback for the student’s work, and shows links to additional class information, like the student’s grades and the class webpage link.

Why is the student class homepage being changed?

The student class homepage previously required the student to click expand for every assignment to see the work they had submitted and to access the feedback for their work. Instructors and students found this frustrating as it caused many students to have difficulties finding the feedback that was left for them.

What will the new student class homepage look like?
Watch a video of the student class homepage changes:

http://youtu.be/cWRrjjm87Aw