Present: Portfolios and Serious Games

E-Portfolios and Learning

My research project that originated at Notre Dame involves electronic portfolios and examines their effectiveness in chemical engineering education. In Notre Dame's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, this e-portfolio project had a number of goals:

• • Provide more tools for goal-setting, self-assessment, and personal reflection in the curriculum.

  • Allow students to share accomplishments and ideas with family, friends, advisors, and even potential employers.

  • Give advisors more information on students to improve advising sessions for registration.

  • Secure information related to student progress toward goals prescribed for accreditation.

Note that the slides below are the Google Doc interpretation of the PowerPoint presentations given at specific conferences. Some of the slide layouts get a little rearranged in the conversion. I am happy to share original .ppt/x files directly if asked via e-mail.

General overview:

Slides from Indiana University South Bend presentation (April 2011)

In chemical engineering at Notre Dame, portfolios are created at the sophomore level, in the first course in traditional chemical engineering (Notre Dame has a common first-year experience for all engineering students). In the fall of 2009 and 2010, the project was a graded component of this course. In the spring of 2010 and 2011, informal surveys followed up on the project.

The portfolios of Notre Dame students are meant to serve as "long-term," "living" documents - items that are frequently updated and adjusted over time, as goals and schoolwork are completed. A portfolio project could also be implemented for a single course, to document a student's learning and mastery of a particular topic.

What is an e-portfolio?

Much like a physical portfolio, an electronic portfolio should be an organized display of one's best work, as well as discussions and reflections of this work, to provide a cohesive story: to highlight a particular process or project, or to summarize one's own abilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

Google Apps makes electronic portfolios rather easy to create, though there are certainly other tools available, both open-source and for-purchase. Google Docs, Blogs, Picasa, and other applications serve as a sort of digital shoebox in which users can simply dump their "artifacts," or evidence of their accomplishments. Google Sites makes it easy to display the best of these artifacts, and create an attractive and navigable "window" into the shoebox, to explore these artifacts and provide space for reflection.

A portfolio has long been a staple of programs in architecture and education, but it is starting to gain traction in disciplines like engineering. In addition to being a convenient format for presenting a variety of related work, implementing portfolios in engineering courses provides opportunities for students to obtain a deeper and more serious ownership of their own abilities and knowledge. Portfolios address all three aspects of courses designed with significant learning in mind: learning goals including human interaction, application, and development of lifelong learning skills; learning activities related to experiences and reflection; and feedback in terms of self- and peer-assessment (an excellent discussion of this is given by L. Dee Fink in his book Creating Significant Learning Experiences).

Three major goals of a long-term portfolio project in engineering are self-assessment, goal-setting, and reflection. Each has a crucial role in the development of critical thinking among learners of engineering. Supplementing a standard engineering curriculum with a multi-year portfolio project should lead to improvement and retention in student abilities as they explore their career goals, reasons for study, and own abilities.

What research can be done?

While my work at Notre Dame has concluded, I still have a number of questions related to the use of electronic portfolios. I hope to continue this project at UMBC. There are a number of studies I intend to perform related to the use of engineering portfolios.

• • What tools are the most helpful to the creation of portfolios? Portfolios can be created using wikis, blogs, or application suites such as Google Apps, each with existing examples on the internet (like this one!), but each with its own pros and cons in terms of ease of creation and organization.

  • How should portfolios be implemented in the university setting? Including aspects of portfolio work directly in select required courses in a curriculum is one option, but this arguably replaces time devoted to technical content. Other options could include requiring portfolios with academic and/or career advising. I wish to determine if a properly implemented program could save time for academic advisors and provide more meaningful and productive student encounters.

  • How should portfolios be developed, used, and assessed? It is important for creators to receive feedback on their portfolios, but research shows that attaching “external” motivators such as grades to projects like these actually reduces the chances that they will become an effective part of lifelong learning. The results of surveys attached to the creation and upkeep of a portfolio should provide insight for making a portfolio project a meaningful and worthwhile environment for learning.

  • How should student motivation and retention be assessed? Surveys need to be developed to determine whether a portfolio project has the proposed positive effects on student attitudes, behaviors, and learning.

Serious Games and Learning

In the summer of 2010, Chris Clark from Notre Dame's Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning assembled a community of students and faculty to explore the idea of "serious games.: The goals of this community include learning about games and how they are used in education, conceptualizing serious gaming opportunities, and developing games from scratch. At UMBC, there is a game development program that is the results of a collaboration between our Computer Science and Visual Arts programs. The increase in such ventures at these schools and other places around the world is a testament to the variety of untapped opportunities that exist in this exciting area.

My current interest in games and learning lies in the electronic realm - specifically, what sorts of electronic simulations and games could be developed to improve understanding of chemical engineering concepts? What elements already exist in today's computer simulations?

What are serious games?

The term “serious game” is used to describe a game whose goals are more than pure entertainment: its main purpose is to provide an environment for training or learning. In 2007, the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s annual Horizon Report listed “Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming” as an emerging technology available four to five years after publication. While the challenges of effectively implementing educational games are considerable, the technological resources are available, making this area ripe for research.

Good games can provide invaluable experiences for their players. Well-designed games offer opportunities to players to take on “investable” identities that are customized to an individual’s own learning style, with the opportunity to explore different styles. They are designed so that players are learners, and active producers of knowledge, rather than passive receivers. They consist of a series of problems ordered to increase in complexity and challenge, such that players develop an expertise and operate in a “low-stakes” environment where positive outcomes are achieved regardless of “success” or “failure” at an individual task. Further, they allow ample opportunities for “just-in-time teaching.” Well-designed serious games provide engaging and meaningful opportunities for learning on a variety of levels (James Paul Gee's collection of essays Good Video Games + Good Learning provides a number of discussions about this).

What research can be done?

I envision developing serious games that are closely related to existing software in engineering, and specifically, in chemical engineering. I have already begun to develop a prototypical game related to material and energy balances and basic thermodynamics, in which the “game objectives” are driven by a series of underlying learning objectives related to use of technical content. The problems to be solved would increase in scope and difficulty; for instance, beginning at steady-state and perfect blending to simulate simple mixing problems, before branching to examples with reactions or examples involving start-up. I intend to continue work on this game to include more aspects of chemical engineering, but there are a number of fundamental questions related to serious games that can be addressed at these early stages.

• • Which “game objectives” result in the most learning? How is this best measured?

  • How much do players actually benefit from playing such games? Are there differences in results for different social groups? Is there a measurable increase in student motivation? Is there a measurable increase in performance in standard engineering courses? Does the game get players to consider further implications of the profession? How much time should be devoted to serious gaming in addition to, or as a partial replacement for, current educational training?

  • How can technology best be used in the development of the game? If a multi-player aspect is envisioned, how should it be incorporated – to include healthy competition, collaboration, or some of both? Could student simulations interact? Could user-submitted challenges and problems be inserted into the game?

  • Is there an interest among commercial chemical engineering software developers to incorporate their tools, with the intention of training players to learn to use their specific software?