The potential of e-Portfolio - enhancing graduate employability in a professional program

Abstract

While professional courses have had a long association with work-integrated learning (WIL), issues around graduate employability, and insufficient interaction between university and industry learning and assessment, have led more recently to greater investment in WIL in the Higher Education sector (Goulter, 2007, Patrick et al., 2008). Guided by WIL principles of the Innovative Research Universities (2008), as well as notions of criticality in WIL (Billett, 2009) and hybrid spaces in teacher education (Zeichner, 2010), this paper explores the potential of an e-Portfolio to enhance graduate employability among pre-service teachers in a one-year professional program. The authors analyzed transcripts of interviews with key stakeholders — including Professional Experience Advisory Committee (PEAC) members, pre-service teachers, and program lecturers — as well as policy, curriculum, and course accreditation documents, and pre-service teacher work samples. Findings support the potential of the e-Portfolio as a learning, assessment, and employment tool – a platform to facilitate exploration, construction, presentation, and critique of evidence (Bloomfield, 2009) against the graduate professional standards (QCT, 2006). While findings point to the e-Portfolio as both product and process (Bloomfield), they also reveal the need to further consider its current articulation with issues of policy, pedagogy, and curriculum, as well as to engage more broadly with stakeholders to determine how to enhance inputs and outcomes (Oliver, 2010).