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The Electronic Portfolio Boom: What's it All About?
11/26/2002
When students study for a test, they can review their own work and read the instructor's comments on their work. ePortfolios will make this easier to do, especially over multiple semesters. If a student wants to transfer, the ePortfolio data may ease the process of articulation with another college or university. After graduation, having their work still available to them in a university-supported environment will provide ongoing value and help sustain the relationship with their alma mater.
Faculty members also have a vested interest in electronic portfolios. Just as students do, professors can use such a tool as their own resume builder, providing more teaching data in their promotion and tenure reviews. Adding access to the work students have done in the faculty member's classes can better make a case for teaching excellence, an area of review that has been historically under-documented and not sufficiently objective. When a student shows up in their office asking for a letter of reference two years after the pertinent course ended, the ePortfolio can both help jog memory and provide a link in the letter of reference.
Of course the primary benefit for faculty is to provide a tool to better manage, review, reflect, and comment on student work. For this purpose, an ePortfolio is a major step forward.
Even administrators may see the value of ePortfolios, especially when they realize their potential for:
- Creating a system of tracking student work over time, in a single course, with students and faculty reflecting on it.
- Aggregating many students' work in a particular course to see how the students as a whole are progressing toward learning goals.
- Assessing many courses in similar ways that are all part of one major and
thus, by extension, assessing the entire program of study.
Ultimately, all of these benefits provide administrators highly useful data
for accreditation. Further, they may discover how to:
- Integrate courses with new methods, orienting syllabi and curricula around learning goals.
- Encourage continuity of student work from semester to semester in linked courses (History 101-102, English 101-102, or prerequisites in a major, etc.).
- Have a more fully informed and dynamic, constantly updated view of student progress in a program, which is very helpful in formative assessment.
Finally, administrators in some fields already know that ePortfolio tools are very useful in organizing curricula around professional standards.
This is only a list of potential benefits to improving academic business as it's currently performed. Each person encountering ePortfolios has myriad uses in mind. That's because the movement of students' work onto the Internet has implications for higher education that we believe to be so far-reaching, it's difficult to comprehend all the possibilities.
Let's Do it
Phil Long, chief strategist of the Academic Computing Enterprise at MIT, has
said that academia is now in the "tribal discussion" phase of ePortfolio development
on campuses. How far is it from tribal discussion and brainstorming, to stable
implementation of ePortfolios on campuses? What rewards are there for proceeding,
and what challenges do we face?
Recommended Reading
- Beck Technology Donates DProfiler to Colleges, Universities
Beck Technology recently announced that it will donate its DProfiler software platform to colleges and universities for use in construction-related coursework.
- Microsoft Adds Gen 4 Datacenters for Cloud Computing
Microsoft is initiating the fourth in a series of datacenter upgrades to enable its cloud computing services, according to a Microsoft blog post Tuesday. And, like everything else in the software world, being highly modular is a good thing.
- Can You Operate as a Virtual Being?
Now that we are conducting at least a part of our business of education virtually and often meeting in virtual environments, let's explore the really big question for academics in a Web 2.0 era...
- Columbia Center To Smooth Web Operations with Collaboration Suite
A college or university without a Web site is inconceivable today, but with every site comes the challenge of managing content. Some sort of automated system is a given, but how much should the site's content management system integrate with other aspects of the campus computing infrastructure?
- IBM's Pass It Along: Mapping Memes Toward A Learning Organization
How IBM's new release is following through on old challenges... big ones.
- North Idaho College To Provide Accessible Lecture Recordings for Disabled Students
North Idaho College will be implementing a new classroom capture system as part of an effort to provide accessible education to students with disabilities. The college will be using SpeakerBox from ClearSky Systems for the lecture capture program beginning in January 2009.
