Case Study Introduction - The University of Nottingham


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

 

  

What is distinctive about this implementation case study :

 

 

e-Portfolio tool: Mahara and 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: These were context dependant as the initiation was bottom up, i.e., driven by perceived needs of and by course leaders. Employability was central to many of the implementations.  Potential efficiency gains figured highly in some cases as did a focus on supporting learning throughout a whole course.

At a senior management level the Teaching and Learning Directorate perceived e-portfolio use as potentially supporting the institutional focus on improving feedback to students and the role of the tutor.

 

Key words: Nottingham, PDP,  Mahara, PebblePad, tutor support. 

 

Brief overview of the organisation:

The University of Nottingham is a research-led Russell Group university with over 35,000 students studying at its UK campuses and a further 10,000 students at its campuses in China and Malaysia. It has a strong internationalisation focus. Further information can be found at http://nottingham.ac.uk/about/

 

History of the use of e-portfolios

There was a legacy of personal and academic records development and use within the University to support tutorials, but the use of this tool, ePARs, was not widespread. Paper based portfolios were in use in courses such as Medicine, Initial Teacher Education, Nursing and Midwifery, Pharmacy and Social Work. The School of Veterinary Medicine and Science had established successful use of PebblePad, and BioSciences and elsewhere had developed e-portfolio use with Mahara supported by the CIePD.

 

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

As of the end of 2013 there are 2800+ using Mahara. All Veterinary students and a significant number in Health Sciences use PebblePad (numbers tbc).
 

Evaluation of e-portfolio use - evidence of value

The CIePD and an academic from Education worked with practitioners implementing e-portfolio use to reflect upon and share and discuss their experiences. The Community of Practice (CoP) was a forum for doing this as was the Talking of Teaching University Blog and the EPI Toolkit. Exemplars of effective student use was shared within projects to encourage wider effective use.

 

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

The University of Nottingham implementation set out to evaluate the e-Portfolio Implementation Toolkit guidance and the following is a summary of the lessons learnt. A research paper is in preparation that explores this further and will be made available here during 2014. A conference paper presented at Epic 2013 is available here.

 

The value of the Toolkit

 

What the Toolkit did not provide

 

e-Portfolio implementation principle
Evidence of issues arising from the University of Nottingham pilots

Purpose needs to be aligned to context to maximise benefits

One pilot used Mahara to support a CoP for distance students on a course that involved residential sessions at regular intervals with the notion that all tutors and students would engage with this. Mahara did not seem ideally suited to this purpose and only the lead tutor and a few students engaged with the CoP.
Learning activity needs to be designed to suit the purpose

The pilots were in general successful at learning activity design, where there were problems these were associated with the fact that the purpose was not aligned with e-Portfolio use, i.e., the purpose might have been better achieved in another way or there was too much emphasis on replicating a pre-existing paper process.  The pilots provide evidence of the ways a range of well designed learning activities across a course can be used to engage students in e-Portfolio use to support their learning, for example, the MA in Learning Technology in Education and the Graduate School Doctoral Training Centre case studies.

Processes need to be supported pedagogically and technically

The pilots reported that students sometimes find the Mahara interface and functionality difficult to get used to but where appropriate support was provided  the benefits of use overcame reluctance to engage, for example, see the BioSciences case study. Short screencasts/videos and other training materials as well as drop-in sessions went some way to overcoming these initial obstacles.

There are issues for courses that use professional competence/standards within the e-portfolios. Where the process is student owned then this can work well but there is a need for bespoke solutions, for example, see the Medical and Health case study.

Ownership needs to be student centred
Where checklists of competences/standards were used in one pilot  these were perceived as tutor rather than student owned.  e-Portfolios are student owned and tutor access to the checklists need to be shared by the students with their tutors - this proved problematic administratively.
Transformation (disruption) needs to be planned for
One pilot involving a CoP for distance students did not allow for the fact that the working practices of the majority of tutors were not aligned to the expected change and so they did not engage with this. Another pilot successfully used a champion working alongside colleagues in a setting where the change in working practice was imposed -see the Centre for English Language Education case study.

 

 

What the evaluation highlighted