Sakai project sites for portfolios
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This document discusses the use of Project Sites on the Vula learning management system for student ePortfolios in the Postgraduate Diploma in Educational Technology program at the University of Cape Town. It provides context on the definition and purpose of ePortfolios, outlines previous ePortfolio initiatives at UCT, and describes how Project Sites have been implemented for the PG Diploma students. The document also discusses challenges with ePortfolio initiatives and considerations for designing effective ePortfolio processes and platforms.
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Sakai project sites for portfolios
- 1. Using Project Sites for student ePortfolios in the Postgraduate Diploma in Educational Technology at UCT Dr. Nicola Pallitt nicola.pallitt@uct.ac.za @nicolapallitt Presented at Apereo Africa 10 May 2017 License: This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- 2. “A purposeful collection of information and digital artefacts that demonstrates development or provides evidence for achieved learning outcomes, skills or competencies.” (Cotterill, 2007) Definition: ePortfolios
- 3. ePortfolio ‘initiatives’ at UCT Type of portfolio Year & Course/ Programme Audience Purpose Tool Assessment & Showcase 2014 PGDip eMarketing students (100) Peers Lecturers External examiners Potential employers Students complete blog activities designed to showcase industry skills WordPress Assessment & Presentation/ Showcase 2016 Dance teachers (3) Peers Lecturers External examiners School teachers Dance students & their parents Students share artefacts forming part of an assessed portfolio required for dance teachers WordPress & Google Drive Working/ Assessment/ Reflection 2016 PGDip Ed Tech students (19) Peers Lecturers External examiners Students make sense of their learning journey across courses in the programme Vula Project Sites
- 4. ePortfolio process 1. Lecturers decide on reasons why we need ePortfoilos 2. What is the educatopnal challenge that ePortfolios responds to? 3. Deciding what type of portfolio you want - 4 categories 4. Designing a process for portfolio creation (what materials are students collecting, who is the audience, where to display it, etc.) 5. Design an assessment process 6. Decide on an appropriate platform
- 5. Postgraduate Diploma in Educational Technology
- 6. Blended block release, contact week
- 8. Vula Project Site example
- 11. External tools - Padlet in Web Content
- 12. Discussion: Where to next? • Need for a ‘low barrier to entry’ portfolios tool in SA Higher Ed • Student internet access – platform that is not device specific, interoperable… perhaps even offline? • 1 system to rule them all – should universities be investing in portfolio systems when simpler workarounds exist? • Distraction VS learning (too many options RE technical side is a hindrance, even for those with good digital literacies)
- 13. Challenges RE ePortfolio initiatives - Too much focus on the platform/technology and not enough on pedagogy - ‘ePortfolio pedagogy’ - Varied motivations of students & staff - assessed VS self- directed - Diverse range of digital literacies among students - Lack of a common understanding of the use and purpose of e-portfolios in education: need a working understanding of e-portfolios in order to unfold the full potential as learning tool for students - Students need to be guided, scaffolding to develop critical reflective skills (Asch & Clayton, 2009) - Criteria for assessment is crucial (artefacts as evidence and how these align with learning outcomes as criteria)
- 14. Key considerations Who are your students? What are their digital literacies and access to ICTs & internet like? What is the purpose of ePortfolios in your course? What does this purpose benefit lecturers and students? How will ePortfolios be assessed in your course? Will student ePortfolios need to be in a closed space or publicly accessible? Why? Who is the audience of the ePortfolio? i.e. who will it be shared with What are those viewing the ePortfolio interested in and why? Will students wish to access their ePortfolios after the course? Will they be able to transfer information if they wish to? Do they lose access to their ePortfolios after your course?
- 15. Universities SA 2015 report URL: http://bit.ly/2qoFQVY
- 16. Position paper on ePortfolios URL: http://bit.ly/2pZBu6A hdl.handle.net/11427/14039#sthash.99 jLTUMp.dpuf
- 17. SA ePortfolios landscape – share your initiatives URL: http://bit.ly/2pZNrc7
- 18. Thank you☺
Editor's Notes
- Nicola shares how Vula project sites were appropriated to function as ePortfolios in the PGDip EdTech programme at UCT. The purpose of these portfolios were for assessment and reflection. Students were encouraged to integrate learning and submissions across modules and to make sense of their learning journeys over the course of the programme. The audience of these portfolios were peers, lecturers and external examiners. The motivation for using project sites were: varied digital literacies (majority for whom these were quite poor), need for a safe space to reflect on teaching (many students are lecturers in their home contexts and don’t want students and colleagues to see what they write - risk), need a space to collect and display evidence of learning across modules. For interest: http://www.cilt.uct.ac.za/cilt/teaching-resources http://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/14039
- Many definitions out there, this is just one I like. Notice that it doesn’t emphasise the tool or a prescribe a particular system. Often I meet lecturers or staff developers who say, ‘Oh you do portfolios – which platform are you using?’ as the first question rather than, ‘How is it being integrated into curricula to support learning outcomes or graduate attributes’.
- These are some of the various ePortfolio initiatives (prefer this word to ‘interventions’) I’ve been involved in at UCT. There isn’t a big enough demand for it at UCT to warrant time spent on developing or adapting a particular system so we have to be creative with other freely available options, some of which are commercial. Greg Doyle in Health Sciences is using Xerte with 150+ first year students. So there are other folks doing things at UCT with other tools too. [Table: Types of ePortfolios, context (subject, no. of students), audience, purpose, tool] *another audience is always the self, sometimes we forget that
- This is the process we encourage for lecturers who want to use portfolios with students - more learning design oriented than solution focused where people jump to the tech first.
- Course context and who our students are http://www.education.uct.ac.za/edu/pgdip-et This postgraduate programme is jointly offered by the School of Education and the CILT. The aim is to provide potential and practicing educators, corporate trainers, and anyone involved in elearning with an opportunity to understand the effects that any use of emerging technologies have on the practice of learning, and how pedagogies need to be aligned to ensure positive learning outcomes. The programme responds to the challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century education in developing nations through the lens of global trends. It is particularly attractive because of the localised slant, where we really emphasise the need to be creative despite constraints in our environments. We encourage students to be critical practitioners, and to think deeper than the hype rhetoric prevalent in much of the edtech stuff out there. Our students come from across the continent. Generally half of the cohort is half South Africans and half from other African countries. They are mainly working professionals working in Higher Education (as lecturers or elearning support staff), although we have some school teachers and corporate elearning folks too. Many students are on scholarships, as the programme is supported by the Carnegie and Mellon foundations. Students have diverse educational, linguistic and cultural backgrounds as well as digital literacies.
- The programme is comprised of four courses/modules: - Emerging Technologies in Education - Learning Teaching & Emerging Technologies - Online Learning Design - Research & Evaluation of Emerging Technologies These course are offered in block release mode i.e. pre-contact online activities, 1-week contact session, and post-contact independent task (online). So in sum, it’s a blended block release model.
- The Learning Technologies team assisted us with the process of setting up student project sites. Most of the design was very simple so any lecturer or staff member could do this, although some parts are a bit manual at the moment: Nicola created a blank template project site (almost like a form) with lessons on the left menu for ‘categories’/themes to complete The learning technologies team added “.auth” role to template site, so anyone that anyone logged into Vula would be able access the site if they clicked a link to the site (site URL). Note: this is technically the only part that was currently technical. For each student, the project site was duplicated from Site Setup The duplicated site was titled with the student’s name and they were manually added as site owner - so each student could edit and update their site. The .auth property carried through on the duplicate site. Each of the site links/URLs were hyperlinked through a Lessons page in each of the module course sites. Some improvements in the process could be: Students could be added to the template Vula site as site owners, and asked to duplicate it. They would have share their Site URL/link via a Google Doc If you didn’t want students to be site owners, you can also export Lessons (the template file in Common Cartridge format) and ask them to create their own import into a project site. In Sakai 11, technically any site owner should be able to mark project sites as ‘Available to logged in users’ (.auth) but we are still working on this configuration Project sites in Sakai 11 can have a dot auth role by checking ‘logged in users’ when creating the project site. Other option is a student pages in lessons – depends on how big the portfolio needs to be. If it was only for one course, student pages may be a better option.
- Here is an example of how the student used the template and added her own information, artefacts such as pictures, links to other sites, documents, etc. Structure VS freedom is an old debate – basic template needs to be accompanied by technical and pedagogical scaffolding
- https://docs.google.com/a/uct.ac.za/document/d/17ZjZ288at23PAWtmZduFdOE3gGrslAPY_g-SNM6O_Uc/edit?usp=sharing Here is an example from our course. I think criteria needs to be really clear to students – what to put where, which artefacts to collect, thinking about how certain artefacts may be regarded as evidence of learning or showcasing a particular skill. We emphasised this as part of a session on portfolios during our contact week. Critical reflection is also something we needed to teach students about. Often they struggle to move from the descriptive to reflective/reflexive practitioner. So we provided readings and scaffolding questions that might help (Brookfield, Schon, etc).
- We also developed resources to assist students with the technical aspect of developing their ePortfolios. Talking through scaffolded rubric and showing examples of good work in progress via a screencast. Important that file sizes are small - bandwidth is an issue for some back home. So in sum, it’s not about the tool, it’s about a process supplemented by a low barrier to entry tool. With this group it also supported who they are – majority of lecturers or elearning support staff so being creative within an LMS is actually part of why we went this route. Additionally, it’s a closed and safe space. Lecturers don’t want to be reflecting about their teaching practices in an open forum for their colleagues and students back home to see. We have to think about risk to professionals when we chose particular platforms or include criteria in our assessments that may open up unwelcome exposure.
- In some cases a project site didn’t quite have what we needed eg. space for students to collect images easily and display them in a more visual way other than uploading to lessons pages so we drew on this third party tool and scaffolded how students add the URL as web content, start URL with https, etc.
- This is just what I think and some questions I have. Folks might not agree with some points - that’s fine, let’s discuss! (Maybe good to be a bit provocative with this audience?)
- General challenges
- Let’s collaborate on an updated version – please share what your SA Higher Ed institution is doing
- I’d also like to say a special thank to my CILT colleagues who I co-teach with on this programme, the students and most of all to our very supportive learning technologies team