ePortfolio Pilot at UW-Milwaukee
Currently, there are five UW campuses participating in a D2L ePortfolio pilot that will last from Spring 2009 to the end of Spring 2010. At UWM, we have 28 faculty, instructors, and administrators who have signed on to participate in the pilot over the course of the upcoming year. This group will either teach or work with approximately 250-300 students. The disciplines, colleges and units on campus represented by this group includes Administrative Leadership, Anthropology, Architecture, Business Administration, Education, English (Composition and Business Writing), English as a Second Language, French, Japanese, Journalism and Mass Communication, Library internships, Nursing, Sport and Recreation, Translation, and Visual Arts. Many of these courses are within programs that have attempted to use portfolios in one form or another over the years, and so their uses of the ePortfolio will range from the simple collection and distribution of finished products to the development of group projects using the ePortfolio tool for the creation of files and documents.
In addition, two courses used the ePortfolio during Summer 2009: “UWM Writing Project: Teachers as Writers” (Curriculum and Instruction 740), a course that helps teachers develop a sense of self-awareness as writer by creating portfolios of work in order to be better writing teachers; and “Applied Clinical Chemistry” (Clinical Science 542), a senior capstone course in which clinical science students work on collecting documents and evidence of professional development for program review. Both classes have approximately 25 students and multiple instructors working together. Feedback from students and faculty in the two courses was generally very positive. Technically, students were able to use all of the tools available in the ePortfolio fairly easily and without any major problems; a one-hour training session appeared to be more than sufficient for them. Course instructors and students shared documents amongst each other, offering comments and feedback for the development of course assignments; students were then asked to use the ePortfolio to assemble these documents into web presentations that were submitted for final evaluation in D2L Dropboxes.
Because faculty in the pilot are experienced users of D2L, we anticipate that faculty will be able support their own students fairly well, as the interface for the ePortfolio is generally very similar to that for D2L instructors. Support for the pilot is run through the Learning Technology Center, and we are planning to use the ePortfolio tool to create and distribute our help sheets and FAQs to students and faculty. Finally, we will distribute formal evaluation mechanisms to the students and faculty after their participation in the pilot has ended.