How can e-Portfolios and Personal Learning Environments best be leveraged to facilitate learning?

This is the last Reflective Blog for this course, although the learning experience that started with this course is not going to end anytime soon. For this module, I learned a lot about e-Portfolios by using resources provided in this module and also from Helen Barrett website.

E-Portfolios allow the students, faculty, and institutions to collect, store, and share information. Students can communicate with instructors, keep track of their learning process, and collect valuable data for future applications in school and work.

Faculty use teaching e-Portfolios to share teaching and learning methods and to document their teaching or research achievements. It helps them to advance their methods and materials, and improve student/teacher relationships.

The goal of an e-Portfolio is very important; the way that information is being organized and presented should match the specific goal. We can easily start with a blog as a workspace to develop and showcase the teaching or learning progress and eventually create an e-Portfolio.

I had used UW Catalyst portfolio tool both as a student and a teacher. It is very easy to collect, reflect, present, and share work using this tool. The privacy setting is well defined and you can decide who and to what level access the data. The whole idea of presenting yourself, document your work, and improving through team work is a great experience for both teacher and student and it can be summarized simply in what Boston University calls it: “Making Learning Visible.”