Drieam had the honour to be invited to the Annual Meeting of AAEEBL: the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning with part of our Portflow product team in Vancouver, Canada. AAEEBL is the international professional organization for those engaged in ePortfolio practices and pedagogies, research, and technologies. In their annual meet-up they bring together practitioners, researchers and technologists to join sessions (both online and on-site), participate in workshops and engage with one another to discuss the future of ePortfolio’s in education. This year’s topic was “ePortfolio Learning in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Fostering Authentic Assessment Through Inclusive Pedagogies and Design Justice.”
We were excited to get a better understanding of how ePortfolio practices are implemented in education worldwide. The meeting was hosted by Kwantlen Polytechnic University on their Richmond campus, in a building that allowed us to enjoy the stunning 360 views of the dramatic backdrop of mountains surrounding Vancouver and non-stop flow of planes taking off from Vancouver International Airport.
As Drieam’s Portflow is one of this year’s sponsors of AAEEBL, we hosted a sponsor booth in the building and Portflow’s product manager Pieter did a session on how ePortfolio practices can stimulate the intrinsic motivation of learners. Of course we joined as many sessions as we could.
It was great to see so many similarities, but also some striking differences between the usage and challenges of ePortfolios in the USA/Canada region versus the BeNeLux region when it comes to ePortfolios.
Rapid changes in the job market are happening everywhere
Students need to be increasingly agile in adapting to new job’s that didn’t exist before, and prepare for lifelong learning. It is widely recognised that allowing student’s to take the wheel of their education is an important means to develop this skill early on. Students need to be able to reflect on their overall competency and skills to understand the next steps in their development.
Centralised ePortfolio solutions are key to supporting reflective practices
Many students struggle with faculty demanding different types of ePortfolio’s (developed with different tools) for different courses. This makes it hard for student to reflect on course-overarching learning outcomes, as well as showing how they took feedback into account and applied it in other contexts. A good ePortfolio tool should facilitate students to reflect on the result of all their learning, as well as on the feedback they receive. Furthermore it is key to get students involved when implementing ePortfolio’s in education, to understand how they can work in the student’s benefit. We saw some excellent examples of how schools are doing this.
Educators sometimes find it hard to embrace unpredictability
As an educator, you always feel responsible for the learning outcomes of students. However, what a student actually learns is not always within control of the educator. ePortfolio’s are a great way to get a holistic insight in the student development, but also to arrange more authentic assessment. This can allow students to understand their own learning process, and also look at assessments as a means of learning.
Good practices are everywhere
There are so many institutes worldwide implementing ePortfolios in their educational programs and organisations like AAEEBL are invaluable to keep moving education forward. Exchanging experiences and good practices are crucial in any innovation proces, but especially so in education.
All in all we we had an inspiring couple of days, with great conversations with educational designers, students, faculty, researchers and thought leaders. We are very much looking forward to being the sponsor AAEEBL for the rest of this year, and being part of such an inspiring, warm and open community.
