Exploring ePortfolio Practice in Health & Education: A Need for Digital Ethics Guidelines

University health and education courses often use ePortfolios as a tool for assessing students’ learning from workplace learning placements. It is necessary for these students to collect evidence of learning involving vulnerable groups (e.g. patients/clients and children). There may be unintended consequences involved with the collection and sharing aspects of ePortfolios that needs to be better understood and managed. Current ePortfolio literature discusses ethical issues, such as privacy and protection of data in an online environment (Poot & Austin, 2011). However, discourse about privacy, repurposing, consent and confidentiality of secondary use of students’ and others’ data, is limited (Slade et al., 2018). In this session, we will share the findings from our research across seven Australian universities where the aims of our research was to 1. Understand current practice across institutions and related challenges, 2. Identify intended and unintended outcomes of ePortfolio practice relating to vulnerable groups, and 3. Develop guidelines to be used by faculty and students to address unintended negative outcomes.