The Importance of E-Portfolios for Effective Student-Facing Learning Analytics

Abstract

The field of Academic Analytics offers considerable potential to Higher Education institutions (HEIs), the academic staff who work for them and, most importantly, the students they teach. This approach to data-led decision-making is starting to have an influence and impact on what is arguably the core business of Higher Education: student learning. As well as being nascent, Learning Analytics is, potentially at least, a very broad area of inquiry and development; the field, necessarily, therefore has significant gaps. It is also just one of a large number of changes and developments that are affecting the way that Higher Education operates. These changes include such things as the introduction of standards-based assessment and outcomes-based education, and the identification and warranting of core competencies and capabilities of university graduates. It is also happening at a time when the affordances of a wide variety of eLearning tools are introducing new possibilities and opportunities to the pedagogy of Higher Education in ways that are demonstrably challenging traditional approaches to teaching and learning, something Sharpe and Oliver famously refer to as the ‘trojan mouse’ (Sharpe and Oliver In Designing courses for e-learning. Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age, Designing and delivering e-learning, pp. 41–51, 2007, p. 49). This chapter considers the role that one such eLearning tool—the e-portfolio—can play in the implementation of a student-facing Learning Analytics strategy in this ambitious new approach to conceptualising, facilitating, structuring, supporting and assuring student learning achievement.