ePortfolios in Higher Education: Enabling Students to Recognize Acquired Competencies - Research in Computing Education
Doctoral thesis
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https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3129366Utgivelsesdato
2024Metadata
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Sammendrag
Competence is an integral part of learning outcomes in Norwegian higher education. It is the ability to use knowledge and skills in the real world, such as in a professional context. However, students often struggle to recognize competencies gained while studying. This gap can significantly impact students’ motivation to improve their performance throughout their academic journey and decisions to continue studying. This thesis aims to understand how ePortfolios can enable computing students to recognize acquired competencies and what higher education institutions should consider when planning to integrate ePortfolios to support students in this process. This thesis contributes to ePortfolio research in computing education, where ePortfolios are less commonly utilized than in disciplines such as teacher education, creative arts, communication, and medicine.
This PhD research focuses on second-year computing students and includes students from four computing programs at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). The research design incorporates elements from action research and mixed methods, involving various data collection techniques, including interviews, ePortfolio analysis, observations, questionnaire, and analysis of summative exams.
The thesis includes several practical contributions. The first contribution provides nuanced insights and practical guidelines on ePortfolio support mechanisms tailored to education in computing and recognition of acquired competencies. The second contribution of this study is a detailed exploration of how students in computing study programs interact with ePortfolios to recognize their competencies. The third contribution of this thesis is a deeper and more holistic understanding of key considerations for teachers and higher education institutions where the primary goal of integrating ePortfolios into education is to enable students to recognize acquired competencies.
Lastly, the findings encourage teachers, higher education institutions, and policymakers to facilitate students' ability to recognize acquired competencies. We might see a reflection of a broader challenge in higher education where many students struggle to understand how their learning is relevant in the context of employment. This concern is also echoed by the Ministry of Education and Research in Norway. Introducing students to ePortfolios early, based on this thesis's key findings, may equip them to translate their academic learning into a work context.
Består av
Paper 1: Olstad, Hege Annette. ePortfolio Introduction: Designing a Support Process. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 2020 ;Volum 12518. s. 209-220 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63212-0_17 © 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AGPaper 2: Olstad, Hege Annette. Introducing ePortfolios to IT students: The support process. NIKT: Norsk IKT-konferanse for forskning og utdanning 2020 (4)
Paper 3: Olstad, Hege Annette; Krogstie, Birgit Rognebakke; Su, Xiaomeng. Enhancing Computing Students’ Learning Experience by Using ePortfolio for Formative Assessment. I: 2022 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962615 © 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Paper 4: H. A. Olstad, B. R. Krogstie, X. Su. and R. Hjelsvold. “Enabling Computing Students to Recognize Competencies with ePortfolios”. - This article is has been accepted and published in Journal of Computer Science Education https://doi.org/10.1080/08993408.2024.2353482 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Paper 5: Olstad, Hege Annette; Su, Xiaomeng; Krogstie, Birgit Rognebakke. Computing students’ perceptions towards ePortfolios for recognition of acquired competencies: A holistic approach. IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference, EDUCON 2024 © 2024 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.