History of implementation and drivers

The University of Auckland was involved in 2006/7 with a nationally funded collaborative project led by Massey University, New Zealand to develop a new e-portfolio tool, Mahara  http://wiki.mahara.org/History.  This Mahara tool was then set up as an externally provided service for all sectors of Education in New Zealand. The Faculty of Education took a whole school approach to considering where best to implement this.

The Director of Teacher Education set up a team of staff with expertise in different teacher education programmess to perform a scoping exercise around e-portfolio use including a trip to America in early 2007. The group came back believing this was the way forward. The core idea was to provide a consistent approach and tools for documenting the practicum experience in accordance with the new graduating teachers standards from NZ teachers council. We decided this was a student task where they had to provide evidence to attest they had reached the level of the new graduating teacher standards. This was a key factor in the successful establishment of the e-portfolio. It became a mechanism for collecting and storing a whole variety of digital artefacts and allowing the student to organise them in such a way that were a random auditing exercise to be conducted by the teachers council (and in the proces of setting it up in 2009 that was the goal), the e-portfolio would provide a mechanism for students to collate and present their information for this notional audit. But also it could be used to provide the oppportunitiy to look back and check on their progress.

The other thing about the teachers council standards is that for the two year provisional registration period, graduating teachers need to be part of an advice and guidance programme. This documentation, called 'Towards Full Registration' talks explicitly about a portfolio of evidence documenting their practice in the first two years, so that was another strand we could tie together with the notion of the e-portfolio.

One of the things that makes me a keen supporter of using e-portfolios in this way to document the teaching practicum is that it doesn't feel like a one-off attestation exercise. The software (MyPortfolio based on Mahara) has blogging and social networking functions attached to it as well as presentation views. So we can genuinely say to the students that for this year we are asking you to do this and whilst it has a function inside this paper, it also has an authentic application within professional practice. Thus it isn't something we're asking them to do on a one-off basis for the assessment only. I think the authenticiity is essential. One of the things students report is they feel thoroughy over-assessed. One of my hopes for the future of the e-portfolio is that it could be a vehicle for more of the assessment, thus simplifying the assessment process and making the tasks more authentic for the students.

Issues related to Governance of the project and changes to policy that have occurred 

It was quite timely. At the time we decided to introduce e-portfolios we had our practicum split into two separate 15 credit courses and were in the process of redesigning it into a single 30 credit course. So it was quite a natural fit to build the e-portfolio into that redesign. The practicum course component was the initial site for the use of e-portfolios and they are spreading out from there. The practicum provided somewhere to site it initially but the range of possible applications is broader than that. I suppose our implementation model is not by stealth exactly but not top-down either. It is more an organic process growing as our experience and expertise in the faculty grows.

Technical issues and Support Mechanisms

MyPortfolio is externally hosted which makes it simpler in some ways. We had an academic staff member apointed to our centre for education design and she was doing a lot of research around the overseas experience in e-portfolios. In 2009 she was the link between the MyPortfolio developers and our experience on campus. She was a key component being a full-time staff member and it wouldn't have worked without her - Hasmeeta Shukla. In 2010 we didn't have her any more but we have expanded our understanding of our use of e-portfolios into information commons in the library so they can provide support from there for issues about logging on, locating accounts etc. I have to say I think we were developing information for the Mahara software developers at a huge rate and the software smoothed out a lot between 2009 and 2010.

Lessons Learned in the process - Student Feedback

At the end of the academic year, in those 25 person classes we spend the final two sessions presenting the portfolios. 12 persons at a time, they share their portfolios. There is a peer review process before that and everybody then presents. We fell on our feet with the peer review process as I can't give feedback on 125 portfolios and the peer review raises the standard of all the work. One of the mistakes in 2009 is we got some early adopters to talk to the students about how to put their e-portfolio togdther for presentation, but their work was really flash and it put people off - made people feel like they couldnt live up to it. The practicum is pass/fail and while we have success criteria we are more interested in them bringing the information together and that enables us to make it non-pressured.

In 2009 we encountered initial massive resistance from a small group of the students but then after the process was complete they were very happy with it and validated the whole process. It was great to hear these people narrate the work they had done during the year.

One of the bits of feedback we've had is that the programme  seems a bit 'itsy-bitsy' and that the e-portfolio helps tie it all together and provides a sense of cohesion to the programme as a whole.

References made to e-portfolios in  institutional strategy docs:

Policy and strategy documents may exist but the up-side of a one year graduate programme is that you can implement changes pretty quickly.

Involvement in projects

Mahara project  http://wiki.mahara.org/History.

Implementation journey milestones