21st October 2009
Woburn House

"Plenty of hands on and some good practical presentations"

"Very good day"

"Realising that VLE's and e-Portfolios are not necessarily the same system"

This lively event with a mix of presentations, discussion groups and hands-on e-activities aimed to build on the success of our previous RSCs London and Eastern e-Portfolio event,  and provided an opportunity for delegates to share current best practices to deliver teaching and learning using e-Portfolios. The event was facilitated by two RSC London e-learning advisers, Bernard Aghedo and Roger Gould.

In the JISC workshop, ‘Effective Practice with e-Portfolios: Supporting 21st Century Learning’, Helen Richardson, RSC London Associate Adviser (standing in for Lisa Gray, JISC e-learning Programme Manager), facilitated a session around e-Portfolio concepts, including policy drivers for e-Portfolio developments, definitions, purposes, issues and challenges of implementing e-Portfolios, through a mix of presentation and discussion groups.  Helen introduced a series of complementary definitions (developed through various studies) with common themes, which identify key elements of an e-Portfolio as a means to support learning, and which emphasise processes underlying development of an e-Portfolio, for a particular purpose, - normally presentation to a particular audience. She outlined current developments in the field, and emerging lessons from a recent survey of JISC e-Portfolio projects. These lessons form major considerations in developing an effective ePortfolio system, they include:
• Identifying and taking account of requirements of all stakeholders
• The local contexts,
• Curriculum embedding,
• Staff engagement
• Portability of the e-portfolio system
Helen's full presentation is in the Resources section below

In her presentation ‘Introducing and developing the use of e-Portfolios’,  Barbara Plimsaul, WBL Development Manager, Richmond upon Thames College, shared her experience of introducing an e-Portfolio system within the college nearly two years ago and the developments since then. Awarding Bodies’ encouragement to Centres to offer an e-Portfolio route for NVQ assessment was a main driver for the College to implement an e-Portfolio system. Key messages from her presentation are
• The system, Learning Assistant, was being used for assignment upload and assessment
• The college still provides face to face contact opportunities, and uses the tool to aid, assist and be more effective in assessment
• Benefits includes a 30% – 60% faster achievement rate; fewer assessor visits required to the college, or to employers – saving time and travel costs, and being ‘greener’, flexibility of when to work and the e-Portfolio and fast Internal Verifier feedback – any time, any place.
Barbara also explained that there were challenges too, and that they had to look for ways around these. For example:
• The college software did not support the large file sizes of scanned photos, so college staff had to upload photos via their own laptops.
• It was essential that assessors, Internal and External Verifiers, had adequate training and could use the tool.
Barbara's full presentation is in the Resources section below

Adele Cushing, e-Learning Manager, Barnet College, in her presentation, 'More than just an e-Portfolio? PebblePad Practicalities', spoke of her experience in participating in a several projects including a research project on Mobile learning and e-Portfolios, where PebblePad was agreed upon. The research covered curriculum areas like ICT: Creating CVs, uploading curriculum reviews for assessment; Hairdressing: Creating CVs, action planning, assignments; Sport: Foundation Degree - reflective journaling on the role of a Coach; Teacher Training: Reflective journaling on teaching practice and application of lectures to practice. Major lessons learnt included the below:
• One size does not fit all
• System should integrate with your existing VLE
• Trial with HE in FE
In her experience, things to consider when implementing an e-Portfolio system should include the below:
• Roll out of training
• Purchase – system integration/interoperability
• Implementation – to be carefully planned
• Longevity – lifelong learning
Adele's full presentation is in the Resources section below

Thomas Rochford, Technical Infrastructure & Learning Technology, RSC Eastern, in his demonstration, ‘Engaging Learners’,  took delegates through the use of a suite of portable learning environments to bring e-learning to those who maybe hostile to paper-based systems or are unable to access the Internet, for example, in village halls, aeroplanes, ships, remote rural places, or HM prisons. The tools are Moodle for delivering the content; Maxos, using Xerte, for developing the content; Mahara for organizing the learner’s portfolio; MoMo for mobile use of Moodle. Although some aspects or features of the tools were still work in progress, the concept of portable learning environments was well received by delegates who also had an opportunity of a hands-on session with the tools.  On Mahara on a stick, Thomas outlined the key features as below:
• Manageable Filestore
• Blogging Tool. External blogs can be included via RSS
• Provides ‘social networking’ in educational context.
• Shareable Resumés
• Document academic, career and personal goals
• Uploaded resources (‘Artefacts’) can be organised in shareable ‘Views’
• 'Groups’ enable users to build communities of practice and facilitate team work
• Highly customisable interface
• Can be linked to Moodle
In the following discussions, it was felt that there is a future for such portable e-learning, but that the technology requires further development. Points raised includes the below:
• With MoMo - inability to zoom, so the text size is too small for some people
• With Xerte - whether accessible screen display preferences selected are saved with the e-Portfolio settings, so that a learner does not have to re-select these on different computers
• Questions about how learners can undertake collaborative learning using these portable tools
• And questions about synchronisation with server based implementations of these systems
The full presentation is below in the Resources section