Issues for debate
Electronic portfolios in nursing education: A review of the literature

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Abstract

As health professionals, nurses are responsible for staying abreast of current professional knowledge and managing their own career, professional growth and development, and ideally, practices to support these activities should start during their student years. Interest in electronic or eportfolios is gathering momentum as educationalists explore their potential as a strategy for fostering lifelong learning and enhancing on-going personal and professional development. In this paper, we present an overview of e-portfolios and their application to nurse education, highlighting potential benefits and considerations of useage. We argue that the e-portfolio can represent an authentic means of assessing cognitive, reflective and affective skills. Furthermore, the e-portfolio provides a means through which nurses can record and provide evidence of skills, achievements, experience, professional development and on-going learning, not only for themselves, but for the information and scrutiny of registration boards, employers, managers and peers.

Introduction

Electronic or e-portfolios are a relatively new ‘tool’ being used increasingly by nurses. At their inception, most e-portfolios were in effect ‘online curriculum vitae’ (CV) -a simple translation of information from paper to an electronic form for online use. They typically contained scanned documents such as certificates of achievement and employment records, a process that was welcomed by nursing regulation bodies. While the electronic storage of such documents is useful, the recent explosion in technology offers much more than greater portability and versatility than their paper-based counterparts, and there is now gathering momentum to explore the potential for e-portfolios as a valuable learning device for on-going personal and professional development.

The paper is a review of the literature on e-portfolios in nursing education, and has been expanded to include literature from other disciplines in higher education. The paper begins with a description of an e-portfolio and how and why it can be used by nurses. This leads into a discussion on the e-portfolio and its potential for learning and professional development, which is supported by underpinning educational theories. There follows some points of note for educationalists who consider using an e-portfolio as a learning tool and ends with a discussion of issues on e-portfolios, assessment, technology and competency in nursing education.

Section snippets

Portfolios and e-portfolios

The word portfolio is derived from the Italian word Portare meaning “to carry” and Foglio meaning “leaf or sheet” (Meister et al., 2002). In the current context in nursing the portfolio is an organised collection of professional work that follows the trajectory of a nurses' career that should illustrate the background, skills and expertise of the individual (Oermann, 2002). A portfolio of work across time represents a collection of evidence to demonstrate skills, knowledge, attitudes and

Reflection and learning

The theoretical underpinnings for the use of portfolios lie in the andragogical approach espoused by Knowles (1975); the student active experiential learning model derived by Kolb (1984); the novice to expert framework of Benner (1984) and reflection in and on action developed by Schön, 1983, Schön, 1987). Knowles' (1975) premise was that students are self-directed, with an individual's past experiences providing a rich resource for learning. Adults as students demonstrate curiosity and are

Assessment and e-portfolios

The basic tenet of assessment is to provide useful feedback, accountability and opportunities for students to demonstrate the quality of their work (Robles and Braathen, 2002). In order to meet these objectives teachers strive to produce authentic assessment tasks: tasks that will assist students to achieving successful learning outcomes. E-portfolios have been considered to be an authentic assessment because they provides the means to assess student's ability to set their own goals, think

Using the e-portfolio to establish competency

It has been postulated that portfolio development can assist with determining a nurse's competence (Lettus et al., 2001, Garrett and Jackson, 2006, Anderson et al., 2009, Pincombe et al., 2010, Karsten, 2012, Garrett et al., 2012). In relation to the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Council (ANMC) competencies (2005) for example, there are many aspects of the practice domains that can potentially be assessed using a portfolio. However, it is doubtful that all domains could be assessed in this

Concluding remarks

As health professionals, nurses are responsible for their career including staying abreast of current professional knowledge and their own career professional growth and development, and ideally, the practice to support this should start early during their student years. The skills necessary for a ‘professional disposition’ need time to develop and students' require guidance in how to collect artefacts, what kind of artefacts are suitable, how to construct an e-portfolio in a way that is

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