Jillian Clarke¹
Yobelli Jimenez¹
1 Sydney School of Health Sciences, The University of Sydney 

This work explores an ePortfolio capstone project confined to a single end-of-degree subject, which asks students to retrospectively reflect on skill development and professional identity, to create an employment-focussed ePortfolio. We reflect on 5 years of iterative development of this assessment. 

We aimed to embrace a prior Portfolio assessment experience that had focussed on learning development while ultimately serving the need for summative assessment1, albeit in a single unit rather than throughout, for pragmatic reasons. The task has three components: Professional Capabilities, University Graduate Qualities and Learning to Learn skills. The context is an entry-level postgraduate medical imaging degree with 80 students. The learning framework involves 3x2hr interactive lectures plus 2x2hr tutorials per student group. The assessment involves 2 small-group reports based on tutorial work, which culminates in the creation of a personal ePortfolio of depth and complexity as discussed in tutorials. 

Student feedback, staff reflections, expert educational designer feedback and the resulting changes over each iteration has resulted in an effective, sustainable task for students and faculty. Students report the task assists them articulate their achievements in interviews for their first position. 

While the evidence for programmatic assessment strategies, such as portfolio work which spans a students’ degree are compelling, traditional portfolios can create tensions2, can be cumbersome to compile and curate, time-consuming to mark and difficult to integrate into an existing degree3. The retrospective ePortfolio can provide a sensible and effective solution. 

Conclusions 

We have iteratively designed a sustainable end-of-degree assessment in which students articulate their unique strengths and achievements, to create an employment focussed ePortfolio. Clear instructions and scaffolded tutorial activities which help students brainstorm their learnings over their degree to date, and class discussion of standards, are essential to bring degree-long learnings and evidential artifacts together in a professional ePortfolio. 

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