Schooldays are hectic. As a teacher I meet on average fifty students a day during the lessons and the confronted communication situations could peak up to hundreds or even thousands. In addition, nearly every student in the classroom has an individual process to which one needs to give guidance, support, feedback and assessment during the learning processes. In this complex communication environment, any given teaching aid or means are valuable. One of these aids is the ePortfolio, a tool to collect and organize learning samples and to fulfill part of the versatile communication needs. In this thesis the ePortfolio was defined and examined as a tool, a method and a pedagogy and finally its applicability for craft education was observed. Beside its role in communication and in process support, the ePortfolio deepens thinking skills and integrates learning (Watson et al., 2016).
As one of the high impact practices, the ePortfolio adds self monitoring skills (supports the development of self-regulation), generates more feedback, challenges major performance and provides compensatory effects (Watson et al., 2016). These above-mentioned skills and impacts are beneficial for the future in work life and atherefore are also listed as twenty-first century skills (Griffin et al., 2012). In Finland, these general skills are named with seven transversal competences (FNAE, 2016) and the ePortfolio can be directly connected to four of them (1. Thinking and learning to learn, 2. Cultural competence, interaction and self-expression, 4. Multiliteracy and 5. Information and communication technology (ICT) competence). The favorable impact of ePortfolios cannot be disregarded.
The ePortfolio was examined in this thesis through pedagogical dimensions:
from the users’, the contents and the developments’ perspective. The role of
resources, attitudes and implementations was also discussed. The results were encouraging. Clear functions and benefits were traced; versatile documentation and development phases were discovered, and beneficial propositions to develop the activity further were found. Hence, the ePortfolio consolidated its place in participating in students’ learning processes. It requires year-long usage, learner centered implementation and adequate guidance.
One key element in the results of this thesis and the challenges of the assessment has been the process: how to capture the process and how to assess it.
The Finnish curriculum (FNAE, 2016) in craft education highlights documentation as one objective but the curriculum does not regulate the means to accomplish it. Documentation has been executed in several ways: capturing some parts of the process but most often just the final outcome. The systematic capturing of the process demands more resources and practice to document-in-action than documenting of the final artefact. Therefore, the curriculum should regulate the norm and describe the means more accurately. The ePortfolio provides a complete method and pedagogy which promotes student’s activation to capture the process and deepen their learning and comprehension of it.
Furthermore, the feedback students receive in an ePortfolio is placed in the right context and the sharing enables collaboration inside or outside the classroom.
These itemized benefits of the ePortfolio could overcome the challenges of documentation and conduct deeper, directed and shared learning.
The ePortfolio also had a focal role in assessment in this thesis. The assessment for learning (William, 2011), meaning supporting and guiding the process, was naturally strongly highlighted by students. Most often at the end of each school year the ePortfolio was used in the assessment of learning in an assessment debate:
the entire processes and the reached skills levels were examined from the documentations. In the debate, feedback was divided into three items: the reflection act of the accomplished objectives, the final artefacts and suggestions for improvements. According to a typology of formative assessment our method was placed to next to the best level and it was called moderate formative assessment (Nyquist, 2003). The ePortfolio as a digital archive can compliantly
serve both the personal (formative assessment) and the institutional (summative assessment) purposes (Barrett, 2007) and create a single holistic combined view of the learner’s abilities rather than separate entities.
Even appropriate and workable methods naturally have limitations and parts to improve. The collection on documentation builds up a prominent digital footprint for its users and the data should be protected in a responsible manner. The student owns the data and therefore the access, distribution and disposal need to be agreed and arranged with the owner. The administration of the collected information is quite elementary and would require more resources from teachers, schools and from education providers. The role of the student as an owner also includes active participation when creating it. This active participation is one of the fundamental principles of creating the ePortfolio (Kimball, 2005). The students’ role easily transforms into a fill-in mode and the standards controlled by the teachers start to dominate the process. Used technologies have also significant impact on the students' active role: technologies for learning make students more passive than technologies for learners (Halverson & Smith, 2009). However, students need to be informed of the standards and the presence of final decisions of each element should be processed and determined by the students. In these creative processes’
including decision-making, students need guidance and supervision. The ePortfolio is also an optional channel to realize continuous discussions. In this thesis the communication frequency between the students and the teacher varied from two to four weeks. The proposals for improvement targeted the time range:
the students would prefer weekly communication and more versatile communication with the teacher compared to the current activity. Also, the resources (devices) were highlighted in this thesis: sharing devices was not experienced as fruitful. Sometimes students described having to wait a long time for the device or having lost the opportunity to document a meaningful stage of the process. Three to four students used the same device in the first five years, but during the last year when the documentation was stored in cloud services, everyone had their own portable computer. The observed change in documentation over the years took place in the final period of the data collection:
better access to devices could have affected the documentation in addition to the personal maturation and years-long practice. More resources and devices for communication are required.
The role of a teacher-researcher has been both demanding and rewarding.
Being a developer agent has provided many opportunities to observe and learn about students and their activities as well to analyze my own procedures. When analyzing students, I analyze my own operations at the same time: the functions are reflected in each other and therefore the stories in ePortfolios are conveyed through several sedimentations and viewpoints. However, as Zubizarreta (2008) has pointed out: “Any effort to organize one’s learning experiences is a step in the right direction…” (p. 122). My first steps with ePortfolios took place seven years ago and today I am increasingly convinced that it is the right direction: to utilize the pedagogical dimensions by following the principles of ePortfolio pedagogy makes the learning journey more rewarding.
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LEARNING. Inspiring exemplary teaching and learning: perspectives