School of Social Work E-Portfolio Team Project Mary Dallas Allen, PhD Tracey Burke, PhD Kathi Trawver, PhD

Background Per new accreditation standards, the School of Social Work was beginning work to identify student practice behaviors, measures for each behavior, and an organizing structure. While the three of us thought ePortfolios held promise in proving a method for measuring program outcomes, we had little-to-no experience using ePortfolios to measure student or program-level outcomes.

The Team’s Project Goals Gain knowledge and understanding of advantages and disadvantages of the various e- portfolio software options that are available. Explore issues of confidentiality, privacy, and access with the various e- portfolio software options. Develop a potential template for how a student might demonstrate social work competencies and the associated practice behaviors through a BSW program portfolio. Implement and evaluate a pilot project. Share our knowledge and experience with the other social work faculty.

Project Plan & Implementation To become familiar with the use of ePortfolios in measuring course- based learning objectives, each of us implemented an ePortfolio in one of our courses: Summer ‘11/Graduate research methods course – Kathi Fall ‘11/Undergraduate research methods course – Mary Dallas Spring ‘12/Undergraduate social work practice & capstone course – Tracey To keep things simple (for us ), we each used a Blackboard wiki shell as our platform. We met periodically both as a team and with the ePortfolio group to identify opportunities, challenges, and lessons learned. We began to share what we had learned with other social work faculty.

Reflection lessons Apart from the ePortfolio initiative, Tracey has been working on reflection and service learning (see CAFÉ’s MLV site, SWK A243) A suggested practice behavior from the SW accreditation body: 2.1.4 Social workers view themselves as learners and engage with those with whom they work as informants An excerpt from a student paper demonstrating progress on this practice behavior: Tony the chef was the most interesting. He does not work in the traditional sense. I have no idea how he pays his bills and quite frankly, I do not care. He volunteers at the Kid’s Kitchen 5 days a week and cooks the food for those kids…. Sadly many non-black people will look at Tony and see a black man with dread locks, immediately assuming that he is somehow not a person they would care to know and probably fear. I believe Tony to be one of the more amazing people I have met and I look forward to working with him more Work remains on creating the right prompts for ePortfolios

Lessons learned Required us as instructors to have a well-defined structure and format Must anticipate needs and be available to train any technology Many potential uses for ePortfolio, but whatever the intended use, it needs to be of use to students Reflection does not come easy to many students; many need prompts and “scaffolding” to facilitate meaningful introspection We all found that using the ePortfolio made us much more aware of our course objectives, their strengths and weaknesses, and the link (or lack of a link) between what we taught and those objectives The ePorfolio holds the potential to make us much more of an intentional instructors and our students intentional learners

Future plans Implement ePortfolios in individual courses Provide an overview of the use of ePortfolios and our experiences with other School of Social Work faculty Continue to assess how ePortfolios may be used as a mechanism to measure program outcomes

Thank you The ePortfolio Pilot Project for funding and collegial support Our students who participated in our project School of Social Work faculty who have supported our project