While a (paper/document-based) portfolio approach to assessment has been in place for students on the Certificate, Diploma and Masters qualifications in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education for a number of years, the recent move to delivering both the Certificate and Diploma via fully online mode warranted a natural progression towards electronically-based portfolios.
The Certificate, Diploma and Masters qualifications in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education are underpinned by a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) approach. According to SoTL theorists such as Boyer (1990) and Shulman, (1993) in working to create parity of esteem between research and teaching, teaching should scrutinised the same ways as ‘traditional’ research by being open to peer review and available for public dissemination. Indeed good practice in SoTL requires that both the process of inquiry and the evidence (of good teaching and student learning) are public (Felten, 2013). These elements can often be difficult to capture, however the portfolio genre is perfect for doing so; the eportfolio even better – as Bernstein & Bass (2005) point out “Sustained inquiry into student learning across semesters that is made widely available in an electronic course portfolio is a high form of scholarship in its own right” (p. 42). Exemplars of how teaching is going public via a course eportfolio model can be found here: https://peerreview.unl.edu/
This presentation will report on the trial of an eportfolio platform over 2 semesters as part of the Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education qualification at UCC. The participants in this programme are staff who are required to submit a number of portfolio pieces over the semester which document their teaching and engagement in SoTL. I will report of the experiences by both the teaching team and participants around developing the digital competency required to navigate a portfolio in an electronic format, as framed by a SoTL approach.