The Educational Potential of e-Portfolios: Supporting Personal Development and Reflective Learning

E-portfolios are a valuable learning and assessment tool. They can serve as an administrative tool to manage and organise work, to present course assignments and act as the medium for learners to record their learning goals, outcomes and achievements. They encourage personal reflection and involve the exchange of ideas and feedback.

Using technology in this way supports students' abilities in using and exploiting technology for professional and personal purposes, enabling any time, any place learning and peer learning and facilitating the provision of tutor feedback.

e-Portfolios is a comprehensive, practical guide for lecturers and staff developers who need to know more about the development of purposeful e-portfolios for supporting students in reflecting on their learning.

Lorraine Stefani is the Director of the Centre for Professional Development at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Prior to taking up her post she was a Reader at the Centre for Academic Practice at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland where she worked for nine years. She was actively involved with the Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education firstly as an accreditor of professional development programmes and later as a member of the ILTHE Council. She had strong links with the Quality assurance Agency through her role as Chair of the Personal Development Planning in Higher Education (Scotland) Network. In her current role she is: promoting departmental development initiatives many of which involve the use of ICT; involved in a major project to develop accessible on-line resources to support staff in becoming more creative in their use of ICT in learning and teaching and promoting the development of e-teaching portfolios.

Professor Mason is a specialist in the research and practice of online teaching and learning in the Insititute for Educational TEchnology, at the Open University. She was one of the early pioneers in developing the medium of computer conferencing for distance education, and completed her PhD - one of the very first on the subject - in 1989. Since then she has published prolifically on the web, in journal articles and in five books. She has worked with many course teams across the Open University in the design, tutoring and evaluation of online courses. She has worked extensively on the Open University's Masters Programme in Open and Distance Education, as course developer, tutor and as Director of the Programme. In 2000, she conceived of the idea of a Virtual Graduation for the first cohort of Masters students and developed the concept with the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute.Currently she is Chair of a new course, called Learning in the Connected Economy. The course is innovative in a number of ways: it is being developed in partnership with Cambridge University; it is being hosted through the UK eUniversity and run on their newly designed learning platform; it is being written entirely in 'learning object' format.