RAPPORT
Volume 3 Issue 1 (2018)
Figure 6: Tabs created within EPOS
ePortfolio tool (Pilot A) to match the OU
PDP process
stages of PDP (Identify, Plan, Record,
Review). Under each of the tabs was
space, in some cases with minimal
scaffolding in the form of frameworks or
prompt questions, and in other cases,
space for students to use as they wish.
Figure 7: Tabs created within OneNote
(Pilot B) to match the OU PDP process,
based on the success of Pilot A.
The rationale behind inserting these PDP
functions in the ePortfolio was twofold:
one was cognitive, to help to understand
what PDP is about, and one was practical,
to facilitate the factual work with PDP
(learning by doing)
At the time of the second pilot study, the
OU was starting to provide students with
Microsoft Office 365, a cloud-based suite
of tools including OneNote. This aligned
to Kim et al.’s (2010) proposal mentioned
above in Section 2. We therefore piloted
the use of OneNote as a means of
supporting students in their PDP.
As advocated by Howes et al. (2011), we
provided a structure within the ‘ePortfolio’
through the creation of a template in
OneNote which we then made available
to the students. Once set up with Office
365, students installed the OneNote
template on their own devices. They had
a choice of desktop version and cloud-
based, potentially syncing the two and
using both depending on their location
and device to hand.
The template was a simplified version of
the EPOS ePortfolio used in Pilot A
(Figure 7) but maintaining the idea of the
tabs to provide guidance through the
Data collection: the two pilots
Our data collection was based on the two
pilot studies carried out with OU
language students mentioned above:
Pilot A which ran from February to May
2017, and Pilot B which ran over two
weeks in November 2017. Table 1
provides a comparative overview.
We used a pre- and post-survey online
questionnaire. 52 students were invited
to take part in both pilots by email and at
the end of the surveys we collected 21
end-of-pilot survey responses (40.3 %
response rate). Due to the low number of
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