Overcoming Obstacles to Authentic ePortfolio Assessment

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Overcoming Obstacles to Authentic ePortfolio Assessment

3/14/2005

By Stephen R. Acker

Editor’s Note: The University of Minnesota is implementing ePortfolio in a major way. Other colleges and universities are in various stages, some starting with pilot projects. How will this new tool fit into the lives of students and faculty.

One definition of ePortfolio is a “digital representation of self on characteristics of interest to a community.”

The community context can be represented as a template into which the portfolio creator places text, audio, and video files (digital artifacts) and is encouraged to include a description, rationale, and discussion around each entry in the template. Taken together, this software feature-set makes ePortfolio a powerful tool for the new 3Rs, representation, reflection, and revision.

This same “feature-set” presents a high-level view of the process that institutions and individual faculty often subscribe to as a method for helping students learn and demonstrate that learning has occurred.

The process mirrors constructivist faculty tenets of identifying the many different starting points at which students begin their learning path, creating a tension through critique that challenges the student’s original insights, and then presenting the revised assignment or paper as a “final” outcome.

In turn, individual faculty can create a teaching ePortfolio to demonstrate how they help students learn and revise their pedagogy based on the same representation, reflection, and revision cycle. At the institutional level, ePortfolio offers an ideal tool for providing evidence of improved student learning, which is meaningful to accreditation agencies and funding sources.

Even though ePortfolio fits comfortably into the implicit model of education for many faculty and institutions, by making the representation and reflection phases of the “3Rs” both public and explicit, the wide-scale adoption of ePortfolio becomes more challenging.

Three obstacles to institutional uptake of ePortfolio are:

1. lack of easy ways to protect the intellectual property rights of students;

2. concerns about increased workload for faculty;

3. the “inverted value” of ePortfolio to students.

The benefits of ePortfolio increase later in the student’s career and may be perceived as minor at its beginning. Let’s address each obstacle briefly in turn.

First, ePortfolio makes it easy for student work to be shared with others, both inside and outside of a class or community. Indeed, easy and selective access is one of ePortfolio’s powerful convenience features and benefits of adoption. However, because most ePortfolio systems require that a viewer obtain a local copy of the reviewed work, maintaining ownership of the original work can only be accomplished through social norms and policy expectations; it cannot be guaranteed technically. Since these downloaded works can be misappropriated, or presented outside of the student’s preferred context, protecting intellectual property rights and maintaining student ownership are problematic.

One approach to reducing misappropriation is to limit the publicly shared digital artifacts to either thumbnail or low-resolution versions of the student work. In the case of temporal artifacts (musical composition or movies) snippets can be shared rather than complete files.