USING E-PORTFOLIOS THE MEDIEVAL WAY

Writing is the historian’s most important skill. Teaching history is very much about training the students to become good writers, able readers of other students’ written texts and competent peer reviewers. The medieval university was based on the reading and discussion of a book in seminars. We have moved parts of this reading and discussion on-line letting the students publish their essays on the web, discuss the texts interactively and finally assessing and grading the students’ quality of both writing and peer reviewing.

At the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen, e-portfolios have been used on several courses for the last 8 years. The former Department of History was a pioneer in using the interactive advantages of Internet in their history courses. Since 1994 the students have shared their essays on the Internet, peer reviewed each others essays and discussed the essays and the curriculum in an Internet forum in our local developed learning tool, named Kark. (See abstract: Kark: A learning tool at University of Bergen)

In 2001 the former Department of History started a pilot project using e-portfolios in one of their 100-level courses. This was not only a pioneer project at the University of Bergen, but in all of Norway. Since then, the department has further developed the course and today we have two portfolio assessed courses using Kark.

In this paper we would like to show how blended learning is used in practise on this 15 ECT history course. The course normally attracts around 100 students and all of these students attend 12 lectures, write 3 essays each, peer review 4 essays and in the end of the term write a 2-hour exam. The teachers comment the essays after the students are finished reviewing them. Then, the students can rewrite their essays using the feedback from both students and teachers to improve their essays. The portfolio consists of both the essays and the peer reviews and represents 75% of the total grade, the written exam the last 25%.

Our main thought is that making the students work more actively with historical problems enhances the learning of both specific historical and universal academic skills.