Transforming an engineering design course into an engaging learning experience using eportfolios

Employers nowadays focus less on academic achievement and more on personal attributes, experience, and skills. Engineering educators must also contend with the need to involve students at cognitive and emotional levels in authentic, meaningful, and immersive learning experiences amidst a full curriculum. Electronic portfolios (or ePortfolios), combined with a series of mini projects, have the capability to uniquely address all these needs. ePortfolios have been shown to be effective for supporting student learning by serving as a powerful vehicle for students to display their individual competencies while also allowing faculty to provide personalized assessment. Due to the personalized nature of ePortfolios, and the engaging process of curating learning experiences and artifacts, we hypothesize that students will come to perceive their classroom learning experience as being multi-dimensional and immersive. Teaching students about meta-learning and requiring them to reflect on their learning via ePortfolios should further support a holistic learning experience. For the instructor and teaching assistants, ePortfolio-based projects will provide a good catalog of work for assessing student mastery as well as the opportunity to make meta-learning and reflective practice part of the assessment process. As students will also have the opportunity to give and receive feedback from their peers, they will have the benefit of incorporating other views and perspectives into their progress. This will help identify, strengthen, and consolidate their learning experiences.