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The Electronic Portfolio Boom: What's it All About?
11/26/2002
- Storage: This may be the key problem. If all student work is stored
in ePortfolios for perpetuity, considering the size of multi-media files,
how can universities manage the volume of data? If they can, how will universities
maintain accessibility over the years as file formats change? There is only
a questionable history of this capability with digital technologies: Data
on floppy disks, used only 16 years ago, would be difficult to access today.
How useful will electronic portfolios be, for assessment and re-accreditation on campuses, if implementation is spotty or non-standardized? For implementation to work, years of preparation may be necessary within a department, program or college.
- Security: Can we maintain a high level of security for personal information
transmitted over the wires or stored in a server on campus?
In other words, how do we make an ePortfolio platform an enterprise application? An enterprise application keeps personal data secure from end-to-end, requiring coordination and support from central servers and data folks. A laissez-faire approach to electronic portfolios on a campus may expose the data to hacking, and the university to a law suit.
- Certification: Should institutions of higher education attempt to
certify student work, stored in campus-based ePortfolios, as authentic? Namely,
should we include this work as part of the official transcript?
If so, then a system would need to be created in which faculty can easily close off student work at the end of the semester. When grades are submitted, the work at that point is certified as the authentic work of each student. After that, students would have access only to the unofficial version of the data and would no longer be able to alter their work in the official version.
- A question for the industry: How can universities commit to an ePortfolio tool that is in its first release and not yet established in the market? How can we count on a small vendor remaining in business over the years? How do we select from among a large array of unproven "solutions?" There's a great disparity between the huge commitment universities may be contemplating over time and the just-emerging state of the business: We have commitment on one side and experimentation on the other.
Tribal Discussions
ePortfolios have arrived, sort of. Oddly, universities have hyped ePortfolios
during the past year, while vendors are racing to catch up, instead of the other
way around. One interesting tip for us all: English departments and writing
programs have been employing portfolios for 25 years or so, and using "Webfolios"
(or ePortfolios based on HTML links), since the inception of the Internet in
the mid-90s. Writing programs have a history with implementation that could
be helpful on your campus.
Here's how I've used portfolios in my writing classes: Over the course of a semester, students would collect their graded papers in a folder. At week 10, I'd offer the students the option of re-writing three papers of the 10 they'd written, receiving a second grade on the assignment to average in to their score. Most students seized the opportunity. The educational value was their reflection on their own work, in becoming engaged once more in revising their papers.
Recommended Reading
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- 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.
