E-portfolios

The use of e-portfolios is a tool that we can explore for all students at the institution. I think all students should start doing an e-portfolio from year 1 of their course of studies, to document the various milestones in their learning journey.

This would showcase their personal beliefs, goals, plans, academic results, competencies, achievements, key learning experiences (projects, work attachments) and testimonials, so that when they graduate from the institution, they will have something to “sell” themselves with, be it for further education or for employment. An e-portfolio with its multisensory mode of presentation will indeed be more appealing than paper copies of one’s certificates.

Some free tools for creating e-portfolios include the following:

http://www.angellearning.com/

http://www.rcampus.com/help/about/eportfolios.cfm?

http://www.eportfolios.ac.uk/

http://mahara.org/

http://www.wordpress/

http://www.weebly.com/

Perhaps all educators should be encouraged to build their own e-portfolio too, to showcase their teaching - what they have done or used in their teaching plans and strategies, what competencies they have, what their teaching plans for the future are. If these e-portfolios could be shared, this would indeed be very helpful for colleagues to learn from one another in related modules. Across academic sections, such sharing could be a platform for cross-fertilisation of new ideas in teaching.