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