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Overcoming Obstacles to Authentic ePortfolio Assessment
3/14/2005
The third attribute of ePortfolio that makes broad diffusion challenging is the inverted value of the work and commitment of students as they move from freshman status toward graduation. Most students are outcome, rather than process, oriented. They want to graduate, rather than track their academic growth between early and late educational experiences. This explains why ePortfolio often is presented as a “career showcase,” rather than a process for documenting learning.
As important as final outcomes are, students’ insights into their own unique learning and work processes are ultimately more valuable. At the beginning of the journey, however, students typically are concerned only with meeting a requirement, perhaps unrelated to their ultimate career goals. Without seeing the value at the beginning of the process, many students only superficially contribute to their ePortfolios. Lacking baseline data, the ultimate learning process improvements are invisible and the potential of ePortfolio is diminished.
In conclusion, ePortfolio can scale, but issues of student ownership, faculty workload, and inverted value to the portfolio creator must be understood and addressed at the earliest stages of implementation. This requires a concerted and coherent vision for the institution interested in wide-scale adoption. Fortunately, there are examples of institutional vision that can assist schools preparing to introduce ePortfolio on campus. Alverno College is appropriately well regarded for its “diagnostic digital portfolio” that scaffolds student learning.
On a much larger scale, the University of Minnesota has implemented ePortfolio for approximately 34,000 students to use from freshman year through graduation to meet a valuable mix of student and institutional goals. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) has begun a 600-person ePortfolio pilot project to ultimately serve a 92,000-student universe using the most recent version of Open Source Portfolio software.
These early pioneers offer clues to help others understand the issues of scale, and inspiration for nurturing enthusiasm for ePortfolio as a valuable support structure for learning. Once cultural and work flow issues are addressed, the IT staff can begin the still challenging, but ultimately more tractable, questions of scaling the infrastructure- hardware sizing, faculty and student training, and building robust content management systems to hold what one hopes will be very large quantities of quality student work.
Stephen R. Acker is research director for the Ohio Board of Regents Collective Action Project and associate professor of Communication The Ohio State University.
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