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School of Social Work E-Portfolio Team Project. Mary Dallas Allen, PhD Tracey Burke, PhD Kathi Trawver , PhD. Background.
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School of Social Work E-Portfolio Team Project Mary Dallas Allen, PhD Tracey Burke, PhD KathiTrawver, PhD
Background • Per new accreditation standards, the School of Social Work was beginning work to identify student practice behaviors, measures for each behavior, and an organizing structure. • While the three of us thought ePortfolios held promise in proving a method for measuring program outcomes, we had little-to-no experience using ePortfolios to measure student or program-level outcomes.
The Team’s Project Goals • Gain knowledge and understanding of advantages and disadvantages of the various e- portfolio software options that are available. • Explore issues of confidentiality, privacy, and access with the various e-portfolio software options. • Develop a potential template for how a student might demonstrate social work competencies and the associated practice behaviors through a BSW program portfolio. • Implement and evaluate a pilotproject. • Share our knowledge andexperience with the other socialwork faculty.
Project Plan & Implementation • To become familiar with the use of ePortfolios in measuring course-based learning objectives, each of us implemented an ePortfolio in one of our courses: • Summer ‘11/Graduate research methods course – Kathi • Fall ‘11/Undergraduate research methods course – Mary Dallas • Spring ‘12/Undergraduate social work practice & capstone course – Tracey • To keep things simple (for us ), we each used a Blackboard wiki shell as our platform. • We met periodically both as a team and with the ePortfolio group to identify opportunities, challenges, and lessons learned. • We began to share what we had learned with other social work faculty.
Reflection lessons • Apart from the ePortfolio initiative, Tracey has been working on reflection and service learning (see CAFÉ’s MLV site, SWK A243) • A suggested practice behavior from the SW accreditation body: • 2.1.4 Social workers view themselves as learners and engage with those with whom they work as informants • An excerpt from a student paper demonstrating progress on this practice behavior: • Tony the chef was the most interesting. He does not work in the traditional sense. I have no idea how he pays his bills and quite frankly, I do not care. He volunteers at the Kid’s Kitchen 5 days a week and cooks the food for those kids…. Sadly many non-black people will look at Tony and see a black man with dread locks, immediately assuming that he is somehow not a person they would care to know and probably fear. I believe Tony to be one of the more amazing people I have met and I look forward to working with him more • Work remains on creating the right prompts for ePortfolios
Lessons learned • Required us as instructors to have a well-defined structure and format • Must anticipate needs and be available to train any technology • Many potential uses for ePortfolio, but whatever the intended use, it needs to be of use to students • Reflection does not come easy to many students; many need prompts and “scaffolding” to facilitate meaningful introspection • We all found that using the ePortfolio made us much more aware of our course objectives, their strengths and weaknesses, and the link (or lack of a link) between what we taught and those objectives • The ePorfolio holds the potential to make us much more of an intentional instructors and our students intentional learners
Future plans • Implement ePortfolios in individual courses • Provide an overview of the use of ePortfolios and our experiences with other School of Social Work faculty • Continue to assess how ePortfolios may be used as a mechanism to measure program outcomes
Thank you • The ePortfolioPilot Project for funding and collegial support • Our students who participated in our project • School of Social Work faculty who have supported our project