Time to reflect

The past few weeks have been dominated by the different requirements for evaluating the project; these take a number of different forms – this blog is one, but in addition there’s a case study to write and a video story to shoot. Such variety certainly beats the need for writing a report, is equally rigorous (and will take almost as long!) but will ensure that everyone has the opportunity to add a few words should they so wish and be heard.

And yet, although we’re at the end of the project and have almost completed our evaluation, there are still things to learn. Today for example, one the students who’s been using her e-portfolio actively, shared her e-portfolio with me. And lo and behold, the way she’s put it together is totally different from what the team had been thinking; it works though and in fact in many ways, is an improvement on what we had envisaged. Her approach will give us some ideas on how to improve the way we promote the use of the e-portfolio to students and how academic and support staff advise students on the best way to present themselves.

We pride ourselves at the University of South Wales on the way we engage and work with students as partners, and this project is no different. Students often give a different perspective and in this case, a different perspective will certainly inform our practice.

Employer Involvement

Following the student focus groups earlier on in the year, the next stage in the project was to increase employer involvement to promote the idea that e-portfolios really do enhance employability for students. A series of workshops led by employers from a variety of sectors were therefore organised during March. These were Health & Social Care and Nursing, Education, Business & Marketing, HR, Music Technology and Film Production. Each workshop lasted for about 2 hours and the students who attended responded positively to what they learnt. Employers used the template we’ve developed to provide exemplar e-portfolios and provided additional resources provided below:

Nursing workshop

nursing e-portfolio (2)

Business & Marketing workshop

e-portfolio

Agenda e-portfolio

Activity 1st e portfolio

Activity 2nd e portfolio

Activity 3rd activity e portfolio

4th Activity

Pitfall1

Education Workshop

Education e-portfolio

What our students say

In spite of the snow, I was really pleased that the student focus groups I’d set up a week or so ago were fairly well attended. There was a good mix of UK and International students and representatives from each of the Faculties. They all had something useful and productive to say and confirmed that students are increasingly aware of the need to establish a positive online presence. I was disappointed that so few of them had actually seen or used our e-Portfolio, but they gave useful pointers as to how we can encourage more students to use it. Quite a few students mentioned that they had set up a LinkedIn profile in their search for a job,  but agreed that it wasn’t necessarily a case of either/or. Indeed the focus group that met in the Atrium (Faculty of Creative & Cultural Industries) seem to prefer an approach which uses a variety of tools, such as YouTube, Tumblr and Blogs to target different audiences, but felt that an e-Portfolio which might point to all of these would be useful.

All the students I met have agreed to try out the e-Portfolio and feed back in some follow-up sessions later on in the project.

New Year – but time is passing!

It’s been a busy time since I last posted about the project with a focus on getting students to start to use the e-portfolio and thinking about the most appropriate input for employers. It’s not been easy, I must admit, but we’ve now got some focus groups with students lined up over the next few weeks and I’m working with some colleagues on developing a model for employers to come and deliver some workshops to students in particular subject areas on the sorts of things they might be looking for when recruiting graduates.

Watch this space for feedback from both students and employers!

Engaging Employers

Yesterday’s Experience Works Fair held in the Student Union here at the University, provided an ideal opportunity to speak to employers about the project and ask for some input. I must admit I was pleasantly surprised (perhaps I shouldn’t have been) at people’s reaction to the project. I spoke to representatives from BT, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, JET, Network Rail, OSTC, Tata Steel, UNA Exchange and the Welsh Government. They were all really positive about the idea of students developing an online portfolio that they might use a) to record and reflect on the skills and knowledge they build up as they go through their degrees and b) generally willing to give of their time to provide advice as to how a student might present that information in an online environment.

Next step – to follow up the contacts I made and hopefully arrange for them to maybe link up with some students and/or provide feedback on the e-portfolio to date.

And we’re live!

After various discussions about what an e-portfolio is…and isn’t, what content should be provided, and how our template should be structured, we are finally ‘live’. Ultimately, with the exception of the HomePage, which contains information for learners on how they might get the best out of their e-Portfolio, the other pages are kept deliberately content free, except for some introductory text. We have created areas for learners to reflect on their academic, professional and personal development, which we hope will feed into their completing their GlamEdge Certificate.

This is what it looks like:

Developing a Template

We had an excellent session last week exploring how best to approach e-portfolio implementation by reviewing some of the examples in the e-Portfolio Implementation Toolkit and devising an initial template. We felt that an e-portfolio might have a number of different roles as students progress through their time at University and could include:

• Thoughts on how the theory in the lecture theatre/seminar room translates into practice where students are undertaking work-experience and work-related activities;
• Opportunities for innovative approaches to Assessment & Feedback
• Support as students make the transition into and out of Higher Education
• Examples of student work and experiences relevant to potential employers

We also agreed that a portfolio should be a living document and above all, owned by the students themselves.

In devising the template, we’ve tried to keep it simple, allowing students to populate it to suit their needs, but without forgetting the need for guidance on how to get the most out of an e-portfolio.

Our next tasks include engaging with employers to ensure it meets their needs and identifying some willing students to test our ideas.

Action Learning Set Meeting

On Friday we had our first Action Learning Set meeting for the project, expertly facilitated by Sarah Chesney. This was the first time I’d taken part in this type of meeting and inspite of the technical difficulties (lol), found the session to be extremely useful. One of the key rules of Action Learning is that when each person is talking about his or her project, the other participants shouldn’t interrupt with anecdotes about their own project. This really challenges you to listen carefully and learn from the others – not easy 🙂 My actions as a result of the session:

It’ll be important to engage employers as early as possible into the development of the e-portfolio to ensure that it meets their needs as well as our own and our students’

We need to be reviewing the relevant JISC resources

Meetings and Actions

With the first meetings of the Project Steering Group and the Operational Group now out of the way, the project is beginning to take shape. We have plenty of people involved and from a variety of departments in a range of roles – academic staff, student services, Student’s Union. Our three aims over the next month or so are:

To develop an e-portfolio template that we can test

Identify and Engage with Employers

Undertake a review of JISC Tools & Resources.

We hope to have completed at least 80% of these tasks by the end of the summer holidays. Wish us luck!

Catherine

Getting Started

Since hearing that we’d been successful with our bid for funding from JISC under the Transformations Programme to evaluate how e-Portfolios might be used to support student participation in work-related activities, I’ve been focusing on two main aspects of the project:

Raising Awareness

My first opportunity to inform people about the project came about at an AwayDay organised by our Student Services Department to review the progress that has been made on the University’s Glam Edge initiative. Perfect timing for me as one of the key aims of this project is to use e-Portfolios as a tool to improve the current paper-based system that is being used. I was pleased that there was genuine interest in using e-Portfolios, but the myriad of questions asked, quickly reminded that it will certainly be challenging to implement them across the board. Questions ranged from the basic ‘What is an e-Portfolio and how does it differ from a Blackboard module?’ to ‘Will students be able to take it away when they leave?’, ‘How will employers access then?’, ‘Can lecturers view and add comments?’ and so forth….

Project Planning

Having now got my head around the project documentation and requirements (I think!), my next task is to explore the vast array of resources that JISC have available, providing examples of how other institutions have implemented e-portfolio use. The first set of project meetings are planned for next week aswell, so I’m looking forward to getting the ball rolling in earnest.