Teaching with WordPress

Our new WordPress platform on palette.ecuad.ca is live and has over 200 active instructors and students across 13 courses and cohort sites. What in the world are they using WordPress for? The short and inaccurate answer is: to blog.

The longer and more accurate answer is that instructors are choosing WordPress as a platform for their students to share reflections on what they are learning, research and work in-progress, studio work, to engage in discussion and give/receive peer feedback. In other words, students are using WordPress to create ePortfolios. An ePortfolio is a digital collection of curated artifacts—like documents, images, audio, and video—that document a student’s learning and growth over time. According to the American Association of Colleges and Universities, ePortfolios are “both a product—an archive of learning artifacts—and a process that supports student learning” by encouraging them to document and reflect on their learning.

An ePortfolio allows students to track their learning journey, connect and engage with their community, loop back to re-consider and reflect on past content from the present context and be emboldened by seeing evidence of growth. Because of these significant educational benefits, ePortfolios have been named one of eleven “high impact practices” in education.

Giving each student a simple blog (or ePortfolio) is a tried and tested strategy that provincial teaching award winner Dr Mimi Gellman has used in her teaching for over a decade. The method has been so successful that all instructors teaching the four sections of FNDT-115 Indigenous Presence are using a WordPress template built especially for the course. It is being used the same way in each class: to give each student an online space to post weekly reflections on what they are learning and discussing in class.

Over the summer the TLC were contacted by Randy Cutler, Associate Dean for the MFA program, about the possibility of utilizing WordPress as a portfolio platform for the two incoming MFA Low Res cohorts. The intent being to give each student a place to post in-progress and finished work, document research, share writing ...in short: to document their learning journey. What we came up with is a seemingly simple to-use ePortfolio system where the student will be able to maintain their own portfolio, engage in discussion and contribute to shared site resources.

We have learned a lot about the possibilities and pitfalls of using WordPress as an ePortfolio platform through these use-cases and are slowly working out the bugs in our process. The good news is we now have some fantastic models and templates that will make it easier for future instructors to use WordPress in this way. So, if you are curious to learn more about ePortfolios and/or WordPress blogs more generally, please get in touch: tlc@ecuad.ca. Portfolio thinking is such a natural part of art and design – it only makes sense that our digital learning platforms should support that work in the learning space!