Digital documentation and planning of student projects in engineering and product design using e-portfolios

Abstract

The use of e-portfolios is very rare among academic teaching on engineering design and product design especially in Germany. Written exams and reports are not always suitable to evaluate competencies and skills of students gained through such projects. A wide range of competencies is required and a variety of results (sketches, 3D-CAD-models, real prototypes, user feedback, etc.) are generated, that cannot be adequately represented in a written exam or report. We see the use of e-portfolios as a solution to this problem. Our goal is to enable the documentation and planning of the entire product design process using e-portfolios for student projects in a course on product design - and thus also include the production and assembly of the individual parts until the real final product. This short-paper will detail the necessary preparations and changes in content and organization to a course on product design and how the students are introduced to the use of e-portfolios. We develop a three-step process, that supports i) the preparation of e-portfolios (in advance to the course), ii) the design of individual e-portfolios (during the course) and iii) the evaluation at the end of the course. The main findings of this work are seen in a provided recommendation on structure and design of an e-portfolio based course on product design (integrating required and useful software-tools and manufacturing machine interfaces) as well as the identified specific requirements of students and lecturers that need to be fulfilled to successfully implement e-portfolios.