Dealing with the death of a patient is something that medical staff get used to - eventually. But when it happened to a student nurse on her first day on placement, technology helped her cope.
The shaken student used her course's e-portfolio software to share her experiences and get immediate help from her colleagues and tutor. Later, she was able to use those exchanges to reflect on and learn from that experience.
"The student told me that if she'd known she'd be using technology she would never have done the course," says Lisa Gray, e-learning programme manager at the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc). "Then when the patient died she shared the experience and got so much support from her peers and teachers."
E-portfolios are electronic records of achievement that students take with them from school to college, to university, and then to work. The idea is that they can help students show what they've learnt and inform career choices. But they are much more than a multimedia cv, involving the possibility of mentoring and sometimes providing virtual workspaces in which students can discuss their experiences.
Take the case of one college student who was held at knifepoint while working at a petrol station. "She was traumatised and wrote about it in her portfolio - not to share, but because writing about it helped her," says Shane Sutherland, development director of portfolio systems provider Pebble Pad. "Some time later she shared it with a friend, who suggested she open it up to her tutor."
Gray says the important thing is that the user is in control. "It's about people, not about the technology."
Evidence is growing that e-portfolios may aid student retention, possibly because of the support and feedback elements. Initially, e-portfolios were used with students from non-standard backgrounds, such as returning learners, and those on vocational courses where reflection is important, but that is changing. Some institutions now insist on them for all students; they are useful for modular courses, and as an anti-plagiarism tool because they can help track the development of an essay.
As e-portfolios become standard, the next hurdle lies in how to use them over a lifetime. Initial work has been done on transferring information between different systems, while some institutions are considering extending e-portfolio access to their graduates, which could encourage them to return to their old university for any further study. And students may develop their own methods, ranging from simply loading the information on to a CD-rom or memory stick, to using the new generation of social software.source
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