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Case study University of Bradford Home Page

Page history last edited by Jacquie Kelly 12 years ago

University of Bradford URL: www.brad.ac.uk

 

Summary Case study Home Page An overview of use The implementation journey 

 

 

What is distinctive about this implementation case study:

  • Engaged in a 5 year commitment to provide all staff and students access to an e-portfolio – 2007 to 2012
  • Formal and ongoing evaluation and research to inform choices, develop capacity and understanding of the factors that support the effective use of e-portfolios to develop autonomous students; evaluation of staff and student perceptions; and to inform future investment and decision making in TEL systems and infrastructure
  • Engaging staff and students through e-portfolio implementation for institutional skills audit tool (SaPRA) for Level 1 students.
  • e-Portfolios are used widely for supporting students’ professional skills and Work-Based Learning (eg practice placements), particularly in Health and Social Care
  • Strategic use of externally funded projects (eg ELP, INCEPR) to inform institutional decision making and develop relevant capacity.
  • Development of users community through research and evaluation projects (eg INCEPR Project)

 

e-Portfolio tool: PebblePad.

 

PURPOSE:  Personal Development Planning, Continuing Professional Development of Staff, Transition to/ from the institution, Work based learning, Employability/ Graduate attributes, Assessment, Life Long Learning, Professional and Statutory Body requirements, Enterprise and Entrepreneurship.

 

PROCESSES:  Information capture, Information retrieval, Planning, Feedback, Reflection, Collaboration, and Presentation.

 

DRIVERS:

ePF is presented as key to achieving the student outcomes of PDP listed by the QAA, namely:

  • Participating in PDP in a range of learning contexts at each stage or level of their programme
  • Demonstrating that they can access and use [PebblePad] to help them reflect upon their own learning and achievements and to plan for their own personal, educational and career development
  • With support, creating their own learning records containing information on the qualities and skills they can evidence which can be drawn upon when applying for a job or further study
  • University e-Strategy £11M Investment Plan (2004-09)

 

Key words: Bradford, PDP, PebblePad, tutor support, evidence, skills, reflection, student diversity, central unit, central strategy, e-portfolio review, five year funded plan.

 

Brief overview of the organisation:

The University of Bradford traces its history back to the Mechanics Institute founded in 1832 and Bradford Technical College (1882) whose HE role was taken over in 1957 by the establishment of the Bradford Institute of Technology. Granted a Royal Charter in 1966, it became the University of Bradford, maintaining its heritage of ‘making knowledge work’, and presents itself now as number one university for graduate employment in the north of England and number two in the UK. The student population is over 10,000, including 2,250 postgraduates. The range of vocationally relevant, professionally accredited and part-time courses on offer has grown steadily. The University also highlights interdisciplinary courses, courses keeping pace with scientific development and courses meeting the needs of employers. Major commitments to widening participation and social inclusion have resulted in high representation of mature, local and ethnic minority students, many from lower socio-economic groups – and an ethos of responsive, agile curriculum innovation and student-centredness in a context of changing student demand and expectations.

 

History of the use of e-portfolios

e-Portfolio use with PebblePad was introduced in 2007 to support the cross-university PDP process after a review of e-portfolio systems. There is a choice of 3 possible options for implementation at course level. In 2007 funding was approved for the roll out of e-portfolio implementation over a 5-year period, to include staff development. Staff from the Centre for Educational Development (previously the Teaching Quality Enhancement Group) promote e-portfolio use and advise on how to integrate PebblePad into modules and courses.

 

What are e-portfolios used for and by whom - approx numbers of students

 There are currently around 4000 active users for the 2010-11 academic year of whom between 1000 to 1500 have used the system regularly over the year.

 

The e-portfolio is used to support student transition into HE and skills development (use cases 34 and 10); assessment (use cases 125 and 6); skills development for professional body accreditation (use cases 17 and 15); graduate skills and employability including enterprise and entrepreneurship (use cases 2679 and 12); CPD for staff development (use cases 9 and 11); work-based learning (71314 and 15); and research into effective practice using e-portfolios (use cases 125, and 8).

 

Evaluation of e-portfolio use - evidence of value

A small team developed capacity and experience through participation in the JISC funded ELP project (2005-06) and participation in the community of practice that developed through the JISC Distributed e-Learning Programme, learning from and sharing experiences with other projects (see ELP case studies, evaluations and project reports). These experiences, evaluations and lessons learned were captured in a number of publications including the JISC infoNet infoKit on e-Portfolios.

 

We were able to apply this expertise and develop it further in our initial evaluation of e-portfolio systems; our participation in a 3 year international research coalition (Cohort VI of the INCEPR) and more recently a review of the University’s Technology Enhanced Learning provision.

 

Our research at Bradford (Currant et al, 2010) has made a number of recommendations for practice and future research including general recommendations about using e-portfolios effectively for learner development, including learner autonomy:

  1. To support engagement over time, formative activity needs to be part of the portfolio building process to encourage longer term engagement rather than a summative exercise done at the end
  2. Encourage and be explicit about the processes of PDP, lifelong learning and portfolio building. This form of learning and assessment is not common in the academic schools and students may not see the value of it
  3. Build in formative tasks. Some students may not understand why they are using an e-portfolio at the start and may not engage. However, learning will be difficult if they have nothing to reflect on later
  4. Encourage personal involvement and ownership of the portfolio. This may be through personalisation options, creative use of the portfolio, emotional engagement and so on
  5. Student behaviour is often driven by assessment. Learning outcomes and assessment criteria need to align with the core values of e-portfolios, PDP & lifelong learning
  6. Include a summative review or reflective statement as part of the portfolio work
  7. Use of the e-portfolio needs to be part of a whole course to really give students a chance to understand the processes and benefits and to develop as lifelong learners
  8. Portfolios are often about the first person and therefore need emotional involvement. They are often by their nature personal and therefore that has to be part of the process. Assessment criteria and other messages given to students have to align with this personal and emotional view

 

Our specific recommendations for e-portfolio based learning activities to promote the development of learner autonomy are:

  1. Start the process with an initial reflective statement that shows where learners are when they start the process
  2. Identify activities that address personal, rational and relational aspects of autonomy; don’t just focus on one
  3. Some scaffolding will be important, especially in the first year of a degree programme, but to maximise autonomy, students should have the freedom to decide which evidence and reflections are most important to meet the learning outcomes and these should be assessed accordingly
  4. Goal-setting and action-planning activities should relate to things that are directly meaningful to students at that time
  5. Encourage personalisation and creativity in portfolio design, and reward it in assessment criteria

 

Overall our conclusion is that e-portfolios can become spaces within which learners can develop and express personal, rational and relational autonomy. Maximising this opportunity requires a significant degree of tutor design, deployment and feedback on learning activities. It would be a worthwhile goal for all students to be able to make their e-portfolio an autonomous learning zone by the end of their honours degree, as to do this they will need to have inculcated the habits of lifelong learning. To reach this goal needs a careful balance of structured learning activities and freedom to discover

 

What we haven’t discovered in this research is whether the ‘e’ in e-portfolio really makes a difference for learning, or for learner autonomy. None of the portfolios that we looked at were really yet fully exploiting new media, and the possibilities of recording and reflecting in different ways. As practice develops within our institution, and within the sector, we expect to see more of this, and at that point it may be possible to discern whether different forms of reflection, or of learning, are enabled

 

We are and will continue to evaluate the institutional use and benefits from e-portfolios and our technology enhanced learning infrastructure and support.

 

 

What have you found are the key factors for successful large scale implementation? what lessons have been learnt?

For us the key factors for success include synergy between external funding, internal investment and a specific objective to meet an external driver/requirement (deliver progress files).

 

An external project allowed us to gain experience, develop capacity in the use of e-portfolios to support PDP and student learning, and provided access to a developing community of practice (JISC Regional Distributed e-Learning Programme). This put us in a strong position to apply this expertise to address an internal University need. The University e-Strategy investment plan created a supportive environment for proposals to implement an institutional e-portfolio system. The same people, located in the Centre for Educational Development, were involved in the external and internal projects and we managed to bring the expertise of the ELP project officer, based at Bradford to the internal e-portfolio implementation project. This expertise and knowledge of the e-portfolio system, its educational potential and his knowledge of the University and key academics interested in trialling the system were key to the success of the project. Also the availability of an institution wide student self-audit tool (SaPRA) that could be easily delivered by the e-portfolio and provide additional facilities such as easy update and group reporting of student group needs provided a vehicle for introducing the system to academics it would have otherwise been difficult to access. Participation in the International Coalition Research Project provided a focus for the emerging community and provided a set of targets and momentum that legitimised ongoing engagement, promotion, support and research into effective use of the e-portfolio.

 

What is there left to do? The future?

Continue to disseminate and support the embedding of the e-portfolio to enhance the student learning experience where relevant and effective through curriculum design and delivery. Our recent research suggests that where students are engaged in using the e-portfolio in a supportive environment with enthusiastic and engaged tutors over the course of their degree programme, the students see the benefits and are more invested in developing the skills they need to become autonomous learners. However, awareness and penetration of the e-portfolio across the institution could be increased and does not yet compare to the awareness and use of the VLE or our e-assessment system (Questionmark Perception).

 

Continue evaluation and development of e-portfolios in curriculum design and delivery and of the e-portfolio tool as part of a broader review of Technology Enhanced Learning systems and support (TEL Review: Higgison and Readle (2010)) and its recommendations.

 

References

Currant, N, Haigh, J, Higgison, C, Hughes, P, Rodway, P, and Whitfield, R (2010) Designing ePortfolio Based Learning Activities to Promote Learner Autonomy, Final Report to the Fourth Cohort of the Inter/National Coalition for Research into Electronic Portfolios, University of Bradford, April 2010. Available online at http://ncepr.org/finalreports/cohort4/University%20of%20Bradford%20Final%20Report.pdf (accessed 12 July 2011).

 

Higgison, C and Readle, M (2010) Review of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) at the University of Bradford, University of Bradford, May 2010 (internal report).

 

 

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