Abstract

Students, faculty, and employers come to ePortfolios from different perspectives and with different instrumental incentives. Each stakeholder must negotiate their own threshold concepts and bottlenecks to communicate effectively with each other. This presentation brings together four research studies dealing with these three groups of stakeholders: study a) interviews with nine faculty members concerning how they learned to use and teach ePortfolios; study b)interviews with ten students concerning how they learned to create ePortfolios; study c) interviews with 11 students, 13 faculty and 10 employers concerning how they read and used ePortfolios; and study d) the results of a departmental pilot of ePortfolio assessment for program assessment. The findings from these research projects suggest issues each set of stakeholders must resolve in order to effectively use ePortfolios.

The threshold concept is clarified by Jan Meyer et al. (2010) , “the approach builds on the notion that there are certain concepts, or certain learning experiences, which resemble passing through a portal, from which a new perspective opens up, allowing things formerly not perceived to come into view” (ix). Another concept informing the challenges of helping faculty, students, and employers is the learning bottleneck, described by Christine Lotter et al. (2006): “A bottleneck is defined as any student-learning problem that interferes with knowledge acquisition” (189).

The threshold concept for students is “audience.” An awareness of rhetorical audience is key to their ability to design and present information in their ePortfolios. The bottleneck for student learning was clarified in interviews about the process students followed for creating ePortfolios. These students discussed how they dealt with being nervous about the novelty of eportfolios

The threshold concept for faculty is reflective practice. Reflective practice, formalized by Schön (1983), requires writers to address what values inform their choices, how they realized those choices, and how they expect an audience to understand those choices. The bottleneck for faculty is assessment of ePortfolios. Streamlining the assessment process is essential to supporting wider use of ePortfolios in a university system.

The threshold concept for employers is the concept of the ePortfolio itself. Many of the employers in our local community had never heard of ePortfolios. The bottleneck for employers is where this new approach to demonstrating mastery can be incorporated into the current employment application system.

This presentation pulls the four research projects to address these threshold concepts and bottlenecks for each stakeholder to offer evidence based solutions.