Team-based Electronic Portfolio

An important aspect of engineering undergraduate learning is the assessment techniques as they determine the extent to which the expected so desired learning outcomes of a particular program can be measured. With the growing demands of industrial needs globally, the learning outcomes of most engineering programs do not just linger on technical skills, but equally important, if not more, on the communication skills, teamwork skills and other such process skills. Educationists thus seek for alternatives to the traditional pencil and paper tests as this instrument is useful and regarded a good measuring tool, but limited to measuring thinking skills only. Amongst the examples of alternative assessment methods is the portfolio. This research attempts to show how team-based electronic learning portfolio construction in the learning of Differential Equations is integrated as an assessment method at Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, a private university located in Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia was employed to encompass a more comprehensive measure of students' learning in three learning domains; cognitive, affective and psychomotor. Involving over two hundred engineering undergraduates, the researcher with the assistance of two other colleagues uses a criterion-based scoring rubric to evaluate the construction of a randomly selected sample of fifteen from a pool of fifty one electronic Differential Equations Learning Portfolio or acronym, e-DELP. It is interesting to note the various levels of learning from the three learning domains; cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains that could be related to the activities involved in the construction of the team-based e-DELP. Time consuming it may be, but with proper planning, this alternative assessment is found to be well-worth implementing in achieving the objectives of measuring more than technical skills of students.