Sport Informatics and Analytics/ePortfolio

Introduction
This assessment item requires you to document your activities online throughout the course and present them in an electronic portfolio (ePortfolio). The ePortfolio is a public record of your learning journey through this course. The style and format of the ePortfolio are open to you but must reflect your participation and engagement in the course's learning activities. The ePortfolio should demonstrate evidence of regular and continuous reporting of and reflection on your involvement in the course.

Some background information
The Australian ePortfolio Project defines a portfolio as "a collection of work, objects or items selected by the portfolio author that provides evidence of a particular nature for a particular purpose".

An ePortfolio is a digital repository of these objects and items (also known as artefacts ).

An ePortfolio creates a personal learning environment in which you can: "collect your work in a digital archive; select specific pieces of work (hyperlink to artifacts) to highlight specific achievements; reflect on the learning demonstrated in the portfolio, in either text or multimedia form; set goals for future learning (or direction) to improve; and celebrate achievement through sharing this work with an audience."

An ePortfolio includes:
 * Representations of practice.
 * Engagement with key ideas in practice and in the literature.
 * An autobiographical, reflective commentary that takes an inquiring and critical stance..

An ePortfolio: "is, in effect, the tip of a ‘learning journey’ iceberg. It is the culmination of a usually protracted, messy, and very personal developmental process. A process ideally controlled and driven by the learner, though the extent to which any given individual feels comfortable and able to shoulder this initiative inevitably varies widely through time and from person to person, making the notions of active and repeated peer support, mentoring and expert coaching key."

The literature on ePortfolios discusses the importance of authenticity, critical thinking and reflection. See, for example, Darina Scully, Micahel O'Leary and Mark Brown's (2018) discussion of a learning portfolio. It includes a reflection on digital identity too.

Creating your ePortfolio
One of the key teaching philosophies of the OERu is "to embed the acquisition of new digital literacies into your OERu learning journey". This Sport Informatics and Analytics course uses an ePortfolio to encourage your acquisition of these digital literacies.

Phillippa Butler says of an ePortfolio: "Many different kinds of evidence can be used in a portfolio: samples of writing, both finished and unfinished; photographs; videos; research projects; observations and evaluations of supervisors, mentors and peers; and reflective thinking about all of these. In fact, it is the reflections on the pieces of evidence, the reasons they were chosen and what the portfolio creator learned from them, that are the key aspect to a portfolio"

You have a range of options to consider when creating and curating your ePortfolio. Three of the options you have are:
 * To use a blogging platform.
 * To use a wiki.
 * To use an ePortfolio platform such as Mahara.

Guidelines
OERu has guidelines to setting up Wordpress and Blogger blog accounts. You might find John Mackintosh's (2017) and Tom Woodward's (2018) suggestions about blogging helpful in taking your first steps in blogging in your ePortfolio. There are a variety of wiki platforms available. Two options are Wikispaces and Google Sites. Wikispaces has a guide to creating a wiki for educational use. Montclair State University offers this guide to creating a Google Sites wiki. York St John University has a short video guide to creating a Mahara ePortfolio.

Hashtags are a very helpful way of sharing, curating and aggregating resources for personal and community of practice use. The hashtag for this unit is #OERuSIA.