Portfolium pilotprosjekt ved UiT

The digital education services team (DLM or earlier SDU) has taken an initiative to start a pilot project in the ePortfolio technology in cooperation with Unit and the faculty development unit (HelPed) at the UiT.  The choice of platform fell on Portfolium, a cloud-based solution, with an intuitive LinkedIn-type web interface, deployed at many colleges across the US. The project will focus on teaching folios to meet the official requirements for teacher accreditation. However, other use cases are considered to demonstrate the potential of the tool for learning and students` employability. The project has attracted interest from other institutions sharing the same demand and hence presents opportunities for wider collaboration within the HE sector.

Back in spring 2019 the digital education team received a request from HelPed to find a solution to support accreditation and the faculty development of a sizable group of academic staff at the School of Medicine at the UiT.  Following the government recommendations to improve teaching quality in academia, teaching folios used for accreditation and faculty development have become a hot topic. To stay in line with the official guidelines, all the staff hired in teaching posts need to submit their teaching qualifications for evaluation and document their professional development when seeking promotion.  This means that the ePortfolio platform calls for robustness and scalability with rich reporting on demand. An initial prototype of the use case for HelPed has been developed, tested and reported back to ITA/UiT/Unit with the intention to implement Portfolium on a provisional basis.

Portfolium appears to be a great tool to showcase competencies and professional accomplishments of Portfolium profile creators. When combined with microcredentials awarded for mastery of specific abilities or interdisciplinary skills the platform can help attract potential employers or partners for cooperation and directly improve job prospects. Here, Portfolium supports design of development paths which can help the individual to curate best artefacts. Naturally, the development paths lend themselves to compliance training such as HSE and internship programs, with participants being awarded a badge upon successful completion. Inconspicuously, the platform has been used with principles of integrative pedagogy to promote reflection and meta-cognition essential for the lifelong professional practitioner (1). Clearly, the tool offers numerous advantages for faculties and their students which the pilot project intends to demonstrate.

Here below you can visit some examples of real-life portfolios which give you “look and feel” of the platform.

https://portfolium.com/GenieStowers/portfolio

https://portfolium.com/GreggFiegel

https://portfolium.com/drdianehamilton/portfolio

https://portfolium.com/MarkBond/portfolio

If you are interested in testing Portfolium please do not hesitate to take contact with the digital education services team at the UiT IT department or with the project manager directly.

1. Eynon, B., Gambino, L. M., & Török, J. (2014). “Reflection, Integration, and ePortfolio Pedagogy” Retrieved from http://c2l.mcnrc.org/pedagogy/ped-analysis/