Oxon-Bucks Partnership

e-portfolio

story so far…

Context• EBITT with 69 trainees• £20,000 TDA grant in 2004-5 to set up website

and VLE• Bespoke site – no annual charge beyond

website hosting• Encouragement over last three years to trainees

to post materials into their ‘folder’• 2007-8: optional project to encourage greater

dialogue between trainees and tutors – through e-portfolio

E-portfolios – aims

• Encourage trainees’ reflective practice through reflective commentaries, individual training plan reviews

• Facilitate better communications between trainees and tutors (who they see once a term)

• Develop Partnership’s monitoring and quality assurance of school based training using ICT

Word based because

• Cheap

• Portable

• No additional training necessary

Pitfalls we have tried to avoid:

• Ensure all trainees, mentors and tutors have access, irrespective of employer

• Ensure individual permission levels to protect individuals’ privacy and data

• Encourage learning portfolios rather than assessment/presentation portfolios

A trainee’s perspective

Minor problems…• Automated emails from website deleted as

spam• School network permissions sometimes

prevent Word documents being opened(need to liaise with school network manager)

• Problems associated with editing web-based documents (forgetting to save first etc)

Future plansRebuild website with trainees able to allocate permissions to

others within the community to access their e-portfolio to encourage:

• collaborative construction of knowledge online (Seddon and Posstlethwaite, 2007)

• Communities of Practice (CoP) model (Lave and Wenger, 1991)

• All trainees to upload all assessment records onto website as part of e-portfolio: reflective commentaries, mentor and tutor reports. Automatically generated database; automated reminders to those who miss deadlines

Enable• Partnership to quality assure quality of training via

trainees’ e-portfolios