Flourish was funded March 2007 – March 2009 as part of the JISC Users and Innovation: Personalising Technology Programme. The project partners were University of Cumbria and Pebble Learning. The Flourish Project Management Board members were Melissa Shaw (chair), Neil Harris, Neil Simco, Shane Sutherland and Liz Beaty.

E-portfolios are becoming a familiar tool in education. Use has focused currently on students rather than academic staff. We wanted to make it easier for academic staff at the University of Cumbria to organise their records of learning and achievement for their own professional development.

This pilot project focuses on first year B.Ed. students, a large class of 179 students. In the first year, PDP is embedded in a module on study skills and personal effectiveness called Skills for Effective Learning (SEL). Some activities in other B Ed 1 modules also feed into the PDP process. Assessment in Skills for Effective Learning consist of a mixture of formative and summative tasks including skills audits and an action plan, presentations and role play (assertiveness skills), peer and tutor feedback, paired supervision meetings with tutors to support PDP tasks and an annotated bibliography.

Tangible benefits are hard to demonstrate, given the novel nature of the programme selected for the first pilot of e-portfolio. The group of students is one that will have more precarious personal circumstances and so attrition on the programme is higher, proportionately, than for other groups but the reasons for attrition relate to the students' personal life rather than the course. The students are highly positive about the use of the e-portfolio to share experiences and gain feedback.

This scoping study argued convincingly for a research methodology that was capable of capturing the affective, social and conative aspects of the student experience, in contrast to the conventional focus on the cognitive. Two major gaps in data collection methodologies were identified by the scoping study: stories or narratives that capture the diversity of how students use learning technologies in their formal studies; attempts to elicit beliefs and intentions.

Effective use of e-portfolios to support widening participation and progression
The University of Wolverhampton has found that one of the keys to success in introducing e-portfolios is working out how to gain and maintain the interest of the people involved. Working with three local FE colleges and a school, they have been testing how e-portfolios can help trainee teachers to reflect on their learning more effectively.

DEL regional stories. Effective use of e-portfolios to support widening participation and progression
Childcare learners on a Key Skills Programme became more motivated and were keener to attend, as a result of using an e-portfolio on their course. ‘People - not just me but everyone else too - enjoy Key Skills more now we’re using e-portfolios’, one student said.

DEL regional stories. Effective use of e-portfolios to support widening participation and progression
Students at three Bradford schools worked with the University of Bradford to use an e-portfolio as an integral part of their career planning activities. The tasks in the e-portfolio were assessed and, on successful completion of the module, students gained 15 UCAS points towards an offer at the University.

This case study illustrates how Personal Development Planning (PDP: QAA 2001) has been integrated into the first-year curriculum for the newly-launched degree courses in English at Coventry University. It shows how the e-Portfolio PebblePAD and the Virtual Learning Environment Blackboard/WebCT Vista were used on the mandatory module Academic Methods and Approaches to enable students to plan, reflect and record progress on their learning experience online while working on their assessed coursework tasks.

Flourish was a two year project funded under the JISC Users and Innovation Capital Programme which started in March 2007. It was lead by the Centre for the Development of Learning and Teaching at the newly created University of Cumbria.

This paper initially looks at the reasons for the current interest in ePortfolios across the educational sector from the recording of assignments to a more sophisticated use for continuing professional development. The second part of the paper looks at the ePorfolio developed and adopted by the University, in 2005, working in partnership with a small business, and the various ways it can be used to enhance personal and professional development. It then highlights engineering staff views about the way in which the ePortfolio can be incorporated into the engineering curriculum. They suggest the greatest benefits are through the assessment strategy and that there is most benefit in using the ePortfolio on work based modules or modules for professional development. The paper then presents the views of a survey conducted with students and staff of the ePortfolio for their studies. In the light of the results, the final section presents the implementation plans of the School of Engineering to use the ePortfolio for the assessment aspects of a postgraduate polymer-engineering programme.

There is a considerable and growing international literature on the use of portfolios for assessment. As portfolios are still seen in most circles as a new form of assessment, it is perhaps inevitable that most of the wordage is devoted to the benefits of this form of assessment in promoting student learning, developing autonomy, responsibility, the ability to reflect and any number of other benefits. Of course ‘problems and issues’ are raised, but the emphasis here is either on how to get students and staff to understand the nature of the task or on how to achieve an acceptable level of reliability in high-stakes assessment. Resourcing or costing this approach to assessment is often dealt with extremely summarily if at all.

Encouraging students to reflect on their learning and life experiences and making sense of these reflections has been widely reported in the literature as problematic (Barclay 1997, Stalker et al 2001). Pedagogic responses aimed at deepening reflection have often encouraged the use of learning journals to make sense of theory in the light of students’ practice. There is evidence that students find it difficult to engage in this process in anything but a superficial and cursory way (Betts 2004). This innovation project stemmed from a desire to utilise the newly developed electronic portfolio, Pebblepad, as a mechanism for encouraging a more systematic and structured approach to reflection thereby assisting in overcoming the barriers to engagement.