Immediate Relevance – Blogs and E-Portfolios
Since embarking on MALAT and looking at the design of our program. I have wondered about blogs as spaces for students to develop e-portfolios coming out of the program I teach. We talk around e-portfolios in our program but have not implemented them yet. Our program advisory committee will be starting again and I want to get a sense from them if e-portfolios for our students will have value for potential employers of our students.
Contradicting Practices
One of the main ways this reading has reinforced something I knew but now have the why behind the arguments is that the LMS is not where learning should live. Prior to the covid 19 shutdown I taught face to face classes that were supported by the LMS through posting grades and announcements. When we pivoted to DL our LMS became the place to create our classes and holds the learning spaces. We were told the LMS is the technology the institution supports and they will not support any other technology adoptions and discouraged us from using other tech for learning. While this has led to experimentation and developing our LMS to do things we never demanded previously I think the restriction of making this our learning space is short sighted and more a business process centred decision rather than a learning centred decision and probably something we should push back on.
September 11, 2021 at 9:52 am
Hi Karen,
I would be interested to know if your program is considering a third-party e-portfolio service or a blog space like what we have in MALAT. Similar to you, I wonder how many employers actually consider e-portfolios as a component of their hiring process and whether there is a preference over a blog versus a registered e-portfolio. I previously recruited students for a doctorate program and students were required to subscribe to a e-portfolio service that costed more than $100USD. The subscription lasts several years and students can continue to use it after they graduate until it expires. This was something that students were skeptical about having to pay for. During the program, the purposes of the e-portfolio include developing and tracking the progress of their dissertation project, collecting course evaluation and feedback for accreditation purposes, and storing administrative forms (agreements and contracts). However, I can see that the majority of these functions can be performed by the existing LMS. It raises questions about the “real” reason behind the use of the e-portfolio for the program.
September 11, 2021 at 12:24 pm
Thanks for this question Jolee. My institutions is small and in the business administration program where I teach we finished a program review last year. As part of that we struck a technology committee to look at whether the technology we have our students working with is relevant and robust enough in their courses. With the changes in coming back to campus this semester it seems the technology committee might just be me so I appreciate your question which allows me to formulate my thoughts around this. I want e-portfolios as part of the requirements of our program because I think they support experiential learning (which is what our program aims to do well) and according to Jay Roberts’ definition “an e-portfolio is at its most basic, a purposeful, digitalized, collection of student work”. The purpose for our students would be to show potential employers the types of work and experience they have done with us (and perhaps beyond the program as well) but it would also serve our program so stakeholders can see the types of education experiences we are conducting in our program. We do some very innovative teaching (in my biased judgement) and we don’t showcase it very well. Openness is important to the e-portfolio I envision because potential employers would need to be able to see it, so it could not sit in the LMS which is not publicly viewable. I will not be forwarding the idea of purchasing an e-portfolio service mainly because I am opposed to private software such as that when the wordpress blog would be just as useful and would be free to students. I tend to be the voice of anti-corporate integration with our program so it will be a hard no to making students purchase an e-portfolio program from me.
Robert, Jay. (2016). Experiential Education in the College Context. New York, NY.
September 11, 2021 at 9:52 am
Hi Karen,
I would be interested to know if your program is considering a third-party e-portfolio service or a blog space like what we have in MALAT. Similar to you, I wonder how many employers actually consider e-portfolios as a component of their hiring process and whether there is a preference over a blog versus a registered e-portfolio. I previously recruited students for a doctorate program and students were required to subscribe to a e-portfolio service that costed more than $100USD. The subscription lasts several years and students can continue to use it after they graduate until it expires. This was something that students were skeptical about having to pay for. During the program, the purposes of the e-portfolio include developing and tracking the progress of their dissertation project, collecting course evaluation and feedback for accreditation purposes, and storing administrative forms (agreements and contracts). However, I can see that the majority of these functions can be performed by the existing LMS. It raises questions about the “real” reason behind the use of the e-portfolio for the program.
September 11, 2021 at 12:24 pm
Thanks for this question Jolee. My institutions is small and in the business administration program where I teach we finished a program review last year. As part of that we struck a technology committee to look at whether the technology we have our students working with is relevant and robust enough in their courses. With the changes in coming back to campus this semester it seems the technology committee might just be me so I appreciate your question which allows me to formulate my thoughts around this. I want e-portfolios as part of the requirements of our program because I think they support experiential learning (which is what our program aims to do well) and according to Jay Roberts’ definition “an e-portfolio is at its most basic, a purposeful, digitalized, collection of student work”. The purpose for our students would be to show potential employers the types of work and experience they have done with us (and perhaps beyond the program as well) but it would also serve our program so stakeholders can see the types of education experiences we are conducting in our program. We do some very innovative teaching (in my biased judgement) and we don’t showcase it very well. Openness is important to the e-portfolio I envision because potential employers would need to be able to see it, so it could not sit in the LMS which is not publicly viewable. I will not be forwarding the idea of purchasing an e-portfolio service mainly because I am opposed to private software such as that when the wordpress blog would be just as useful and would be free to students. I tend to be the voice of anti-corporate integration with our program so it will be a hard no to making students purchase an e-portfolio program from me.
Robert, Jay. (2016). Experiential Education in the College Context. New York, NY.
September 11, 2021 at 9:53 am
Thank you for this post, Karen. Could you speak more as to why you see this restriction as being short-sighted? Does it have to do with DL-related shortcomings? Or, with affordances found in other spaces? With this, how do you see the institution being able to support a more diverse selection of tool by a wide range of stakeholders?
September 11, 2021 at 12:43 pm
Hi George
Thanks for asking this I think I can narrow it down to three ways I find the LMS restrictive. To put this in perspective our institution probably does not have all the bells and whistles a large school would have so our version of the software is likely more limited than other institutions.
One of the ways I find our LMS restrictive is the lack of collaboration tools for learners. If I want to teach from a constructivist type of approach it is difficult to design that just using the LMS. Students cannot control the space. There is not a whiteboard or brainstorming place such as say Miro or google jam boards for example. I can do some things that are collaborative such as discussion forums but that’s all. I control the announcements feed currently. Students cannot do that as they can when we move our course to the web. I am not a good front and centre teacher. My students do better and have more meaningful learning when they control the space more.
Another way I find it restrictive is I like to teach in the open when possible. I want the majority of my course materials to be in the open, I use open texts and I want the process of my students to also be in the open particularly in second year when they are really ready to show their skills to an audience (we are a two year college). The LMS does not allow that. Once the students are done their course they don’t even see what they have really done anymore. The artifact of learning is not readily available to them.
Thirdly and this might be very much related to my institution is that we really don’t have the support for our LMS to be a tool for teaching. When we do have support it is like a hotline of someone on the phone looking up the FAQs and telling us how to fix something. We don’t have a good alignment with how the LMS can be used for learning and how to navigate the tech. I see the LMS as fine for holding grades and integrating with the registrar but if there is no consideration of how it shapes the learning it’s just a registrar tool and apart from holding grades everything we use it for is available in other ways on the web.
September 11, 2021 at 9:53 am
Thank you for this post, Karen. Could you speak more as to why you see this restriction as being short-sighted? Does it have to do with DL-related shortcomings? Or, with affordances found in other spaces? With this, how do you see the institution being able to support a more diverse selection of tool by a wide range of stakeholders?
September 11, 2021 at 12:43 pm
Hi George
Thanks for asking this I think I can narrow it down to three ways I find the LMS restrictive. To put this in perspective our institution probably does not have all the bells and whistles a large school would have so our version of the software is likely more limited than other institutions.
One of the ways I find our LMS restrictive is the lack of collaboration tools for learners. If I want to teach from a constructivist type of approach it is difficult to design that just using the LMS. Students cannot control the space. There is not a whiteboard or brainstorming place such as say Miro or google jam boards for example. I can do some things that are collaborative such as discussion forums but that’s all. I control the announcements feed currently. Students cannot do that as they can when we move our course to the web. I am not a good front and centre teacher. My students do better and have more meaningful learning when they control the space more.
Another way I find it restrictive is I like to teach in the open when possible. I want the majority of my course materials to be in the open, I use open texts and I want the process of my students to also be in the open particularly in second year when they are really ready to show their skills to an audience (we are a two year college). The LMS does not allow that. Once the students are done their course they don’t even see what they have really done anymore. The artifact of learning is not readily available to them.
Thirdly and this might be very much related to my institution is that we really don’t have the support for our LMS to be a tool for teaching. When we do have support it is like a hotline of someone on the phone looking up the FAQs and telling us how to fix something. We don’t have a good alignment with how the LMS can be used for learning and how to navigate the tech. I see the LMS as fine for holding grades and integrating with the registrar but if there is no consideration of how it shapes the learning it’s just a registrar tool and apart from holding grades everything we use it for is available in other ways on the web.
September 25, 2021 at 7:06 pm
Hi Karen,
I’m curious to know which LMS your institution is using, if you’re able to share? Feel free to DM me at alisha.hadley@royalroads.ca.
Thanks,
Alisha
September 30, 2021 at 12:05 pm
Hi Alisha
We use Brightspace and I understand from IT it is a version that is not full of bells and whistle but honestly you could not add a bell or whistle that will make me satisfied with it. It’s stifling no matter what they add.
I have reached out to some of the ed tech gurus in BC about what other institutions do in their LMS, how they manage their walled garden and where they try to break free from it. I am getting the sense there are many others who believe in open source over proprietary software. I will follow up with what they shared with me in another blog post that is currently being drafted.
September 25, 2021 at 7:06 pm
Hi Karen,
I’m curious to know which LMS your institution is using, if you’re able to share? Feel free to DM me at alisha.hadley@royalroads.ca.
Thanks,
Alisha
September 30, 2021 at 12:05 pm
Hi Alisha
We use Brightspace and I understand from IT it is a version that is not full of bells and whistle but honestly you could not add a bell or whistle that will make me satisfied with it. It’s stifling no matter what they add.
I have reached out to some of the ed tech gurus in BC about what other institutions do in their LMS, how they manage their walled garden and where they try to break free from it. I am getting the sense there are many others who believe in open source over proprietary software. I will follow up with what they shared with me in another blog post that is currently being drafted.