STLHE 2016 SAPES

Eportfolios, as both a technology and a pedagogy, are an effective tool which helps empower students to take ownership of their learning in their academic and professional lives. Although ample best practices for eportfolio usage exist, we would argue that we need to consider the critical role that the instructor has in ensuring the success of the eportfolio activity. During this session, participants will act as researchers, identifying factors and instructor attributes that may impact the success of this pedagogical implementation.


We will examine the degree to which student and instructor alignment in expectations, such as assignment guidelines, intended learning outcomes, and time necessary to complete the assignment, correlates with the success of the eportfolio learning activity. Cases of alignment, which presumably should result in positive learning experiences, and cases of misalignment, which should be less effective, are focused upon, drawing upon research conducted at the University of Waterloo. Although factors such as the ePortfolio platform, university culture, and scalability issues play a role in determining the success of the ePortfolio activity, we argue that the crucial role that the instructor plays in the process has yet to be analyzed in detail.


Looking to research that explores barriers to innovation and instructor self-efficacy, we present a model which conceptualizes instructors as taking surface, strategic, or deep approaches to using ePortfolios, and we theorize that these approaches can impact the success of these implementations.