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The Electronic Portfolio Boom: What's it All About?
11/26/2002
The term "electronic portfolio," or "ePortfolio," is on everyone's lips. We often hear it associated with assessment, but also with accreditation, reflection, student resumes, and career tracking. It's as if this new tool is the answer to all the questions we didn't realize we were asking.
A portfolio, electronic or paper, is simply an organized collection of completed work. Art students have built portfolios for decades. What makes ePortfolios so enchanting to so many is the intersection of three trends:
- Student work is now mostly in electronic form, or is based on a canonical electronic file even if it's printed out: papers, reports, proposals, simulations, solutions, experiments, renditions, graphics, or just about any other kind of student work.
- The Web is everywhere: We assume (not always true, of course) that our students have ready access to the Web. The work is "out there" on the Internet, and therefore the first step for transferring work to a Web site has already been taken.
- Databases are available through Web sites, allowing students to manage large volumes of their work. The "dynamic" Web site that's database-driven, instead of HTML link-driven, has become the norm for Web developers.
We've reached a critical mass, habits have changed, and as we reach electronic "saturation" on campus, new norms of work are emerging. Arising out of this critical mass is a vision of how higher education can benefit, which is with the ePortfolio.
We seem to be beginning a new wave of technology development in higher education. Freeing student work from paper and making it organized, searchable, and transportable opens enormous possibilities for re-thinking whole curricula: the evaluation of faculty, assessment of programs, certification of student work, how accreditation works. In short, ePortfolios might be the biggest thing in technology innovation on campus. Electronic portfolios have a greater potential to alter higher education at its very core than any other technology application we've known thus far.
The momentum is building. A year ago, companies I talked with had not even heard of ePortfolios. But at a focus session in October, sponsored by Educause's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (www.educause.edu/nlii/), we found out how far this market has come: A number of technology vendors and publishers are starting to offer ePortfolio tools. The focus session helped us all see the bigger picture. I came away saying to myself, "I knew it had grown, but I had no idea by how much!"
ePortfolio developers are making sure that their platforms can accept the full range of file types and content: text, graphics, video, audio, photos, and animation. The manner in which student work is turned in, commented on, turned back to students, reviewed in the aggregate over a semester, and certified can be—and is being—deeply altered and unimaginably extended.
This tool brings to bear the native talents of computers—storage, management of data, retrieval, display, and communication—to challenge how to better organize student work to improve teaching and learning. It seems, on the surface, too good to be true.
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