The design, implementation and evaluation of a web-based student teachers' ePortfolio (STeP)

This paper presents the development process of a web-based student teachers' ePortfolio system for the Faculty of Education at the University of Malta. Literature shows that at a higher educational level, a student ePortfolio is becoming an important tool as it is being used to enhance the learning process through constant tutor and peer feedback, self-regulation and reflection. Many ePortfolio applications exist that may help university faculties to collaborate with their students. However, these existing applications concentrate on general ePortfolio content and allow limited flexibility to be tailored to specific structured ePortfolios that is actually needed by the demanding faculty. In our opinion a new tailor-made structured ePortfolio is needed specifically to replace the manual professional development portfolio system. The proposed system will be the official ePortfolio for the Faculty of Education to be used compulsory by students that are reading a bachelors degree in Education with a secondary track at the University of Malta. Therefore we proposed the full lifecycle development of a new web-based student teachers' ePortfolio which we call STeP. A sample of fifteen selected participants, which include the chairperson of the Professional Development Portfolio, an administrator, tutors and students have taken part in different stages of the software development and played an important role in its success. We show all the stages involved that led to the successful implementation of the proposed tailor-made ePortfolio system. We evaluate our system and present a qualitative outcome for its implementation.