UMinnesota Satellite Broadcast

This morning’s broadcast, co-sponsored by BCCampus, showed a wide-range of e-portfolio practice across a large geographical area (Canada, US, UK, Europe, Australia). The title of the broadcast was “Electronic Portfolios for Lifelong and Lifewide Learning: Research and Practice.”

The Minnesota eFolio system is statewide and currently has 30,000 users. Darren Cambridge (George Mason University) conducted a research project with UMinn on e-portfolio use and gave a good overview of some of the research questions pursued. Some of those questions were:
– how does reflection impact student learning?
– what impact do e-portfolios have on student’s engagement with their learning?
– do e-portfolios help improve the workplace experience?
– do e-portfolios help students and instructors reach their educational goals?

These questions are similar to the one being aksed by David Tosh in his PhD. research, as well as, some of our project leads here at UBC. It will be interesting to see how some of our findings compare with those of Darren Cambridge and the eFolio folks.

The hand-out from this morning’s broadcast has more information on the various systems that were highlighted and on the research project itself. It will soon be posted for CoP members in the Community area of the blog.