Eportfolios in Engineering – Advantages and Disadvantages

Recently, John Fielke talked to us about his experiences with using e-portfolios in his course ‘Computer Techniques’. This posting will highlight some of the advantages and disadvantages John found when using PebblePad with his first year engineering students.

Using PebblePad as a webfolio tool with engineering students - Advantages and Disadvantages.

Advantages:
I chose to use PebblePad as a tool for the students to use to submit their computer models and drawings. The year before, we used AssignIT where the students put all their work into one zip file and uploaded it into AssignIT, producing a series of files for assessment. By using PebblePad, I was looking at linking those files together with a bit of reflection from the students about how they completed the assigned tasks. AssignIT requires all of the student’s work to be bundled into one zip file and submitted as one file. I have used this twice now with large files and on both occasions, AssignIT has crashed as the students were submitting these very large files at the same time. PebblePad not only allows multiple smaller files to be uploaded, the students can upload these files gradually each week.

I used the profiler tool to get the students to look at their work and reflect on their learning outcomes by answering a series of questions. The profiler tool is a dynamic, real time resource so we can look at the students’ work and provide immediate feedback, and allow the students to act on this feedback prior to their work being assessed. In addition, it can actually make marking very easy because work can be assessed as it is submitted rather than in a block at the end of the course.

Students saw growth in their knowledge

Another advantage is file preservation. If the students upload their work regularly, they reduce the risks of losing files or having their files corrupted.

Students can create a personal page with a photo of themselves, a few of their aspirations and a some personal background allowing academics to get know the students on a personal level and not just their name and ID number. If webfolios are used across multiple courses, the students can just call up this page into each course webfolio.

Disadvantages:

To utilise some of PebblePad’s features the students need to upload their work regularly, but many were reluctant to do this. Few students took the opportunity to respond to the feedback we provided and make changes to their work before it was formally assessed.

Some students did not understand the importance of sending their work to the gateway. We also had the issue of students thinking they could use the one webfolio for two courses resulting in some students sending work to the wrong gateway.

PebblePad is an interesting repository for work but the way it is structured, asset tracking and asset finding is not very user friendly. Asset management issues included students deleting files and breaking links between files, or updating a file and not updating the hyperlinks resulting in missing files. All we see is what students link to their webfolio, not the work that they have uploaded into PebblePad. Additionally, some students compressed their work up in file formats not able to be opened by the university computers. The students needed to resubmit in the correct zip file format. We held a session on webfolio development but less than half the students attended that session. The students who attended the session found it much easier than those who did not.

In hindsight, I realise that I should have asked the students to submit a single zip file each week and post a reflective comment about that week’s work rather than submitting up to 10 files for a week. Accessing multiple files is very time consuming in PebblePad.

A passionate group of students absolutely disliked PebblePad as it was either too difficult to use or too simplistic in its capabilities. Others wanted to personalise it to the limits that other web authoring software allows. PebblePad did not easily allow this. The other drawback of PebblePad is that we were looking at engineering drawings and whilst it allows viewing of jpegs their resolution was not high enough for us to read these drawings very clearly and individual files had to be opened in a series of cascading menus to view their work and this became quite time consuming.

Future Directions

Some of the improvements that could be made to Pebble Pad are to give it a corporate UniSA rather than a primary school feel. I would like to see it re-badged, corporatised and the PebblePad name removed. The interfaces, the fonts and low-tech look of it do not appeal to engineering students.

I still think that e-portfolios are a good learning tool for the students and they integrate and roll everything in together. The students have a record of their learning, which they can reflect on if they want to. My advice to other academics would be to get on board and use some of these developments that the university is resourcing and not try to do these things on your own, but have the corporate body backing you. After my experience with PebblePad this year, I would love to use some form of effective, interactive, feedback providing, reflective online submission method in the future.