Danube University Krems is located in Austria. As the only state owned university in Europe that has specialised in postgraduate continuing education, the university is facing up to the technological and social challenges of lifelong learning and implementing innovation in education, both in research and teaching. The university was established in 1995, has 3 faculties, 445 employees (118 academic staff) and manages 212 postgraduate study programmes for a total of 5692 students from 78 countries, including Master programmes in Education and Media, Business and Law, Health and Medicine, and various other disciplines.
The Department of Interactive Media and Educational Technologies of the university specialises in Educational Technology Teaching and Research. A main focus of our work relates to the design, realisation and evaluation of didactic arrangements for technology supported learning in diverse educational sectors, including primary to tertiary education and further education. Researchers have been active in the field of ePortfolio research for a long period, published a number of articles related to ePortfolios (see below), as well as implemented and evaluated ePortfolios in Higher Education. Other scientific interests of our researchers relate to Technology Enhanced Learning, Social Software and Web 2.0. We developed over 20 additional European research projects over the last 10 years and coordinated as well as co-operated in many European projects, including LLP, eContentPlus, and the 6th and 7th framework programmes, EuroPLOT (KA3, 2009-2012), eduCore (Grundtvig, 2008-2010), fe|male (Sparkling Science, 2008-2010), MELT (eContentPlus, 2006-2009), etc.
EPortfolio related work:
Danube University Krems have been using and validating ePortfolios successfully within own university course programmes, by introducing an ePortfolio software system at university and connecting it to the existing learning infrastructure of the university. Both students and teachers regard these ePortfolios as highly innovative and particularly valuable in supporting reflective learning as well as in delivering engaging learning experience while at the same time enabling sound monitoring and reflection mechanisms.
Researchers at Danube University Krems have been doing research on various related aspects, including didactical implications of ePortfolio work in education. Based on the analysis of validated implementation models and case studies, they developed taxonomy for ePortfolios and identified 37 patterns of ePortfolios within a two-years-research project. Compared to conventional didactical guidelines, these ePortfolio patterns support a much wider variety of application scenarios than conventional didactical guidelines would do. Researchers from the university have published a number of articles related to ePortfolios (some of which are shown in Section C.2) as well as a book in 2009 (Baumgartner, P., Zauchner, S. & Bauer, R. (Editors). The Potential of EPortfolios in Higher Education, Waxmann), and are currently working on new publications, including a book related to the description of ePortfolio patterns identified in the project.
