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ePortfolios >> Hi-Octane Assessment
8/16/2005
“Among those people who use it, our Electronic Portfolio Project has changed the conversations in education across our state to the point where we don’t talk about technology,” she says. “The next step is getting it to the point where everyone’s using it, and the ePortfolio is the norm.”
The Gradualist
The ePortfolio effort at Villanova University began with a bang in June 2004, when campus technologists threw a bash to launch the effort in style. They called the celebration ePortfolio Day, and invited a number of vendors to campus to present and pitch their wares. After comprehensive feedback from user groups comprised of students and educators, the technologists selected the online portfolio assessment system from TaskStream (www.taskstream.com). The TaskStream rollout began immediately, with pilot programs in the Education and Political Science departments of the College of Arts and Sciences. A month after the the contract with TaskStream was signed, a handful of Villanova seniors were building portfolios online.
Yet, the process did not take place in a vacuum. Behind the scenes, TaskStream provided specialists in Villanova’s Instructional Technologies department with the know-how to train educators in the new technology. As students explored the system, so did educators; they sat through training sessions in various computer labs on campus and poked around the software on their own.
Dan McGee, director of Instructional Technologies, recalls that the universitywent to great lengths to make sure that all of the teachers and students in the two trial departments were comfortable with incorporating the technology into their everyday lives. The goal, he added, was simple: to revolutionize the way Villanova approached assessment, and multiply the degree to which users relied upon technology on a day-to-day basis.
| ePORTFOLIO POWER |
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| Based on eight standards and 42 performance criteria, the ePortfolio team at the University of Iowa developed an ePortfolio template that revolutionizes the tenure process. Assessment of the professor seeking tenure is now done through an ePortfolio instead of via paper-based files, the method used in past. |
“From a planning standpoint, our strategy is always to provide the best and most effective technologies to solve the problems we have,” he says. “We wanted to improve assessment and the outcome achievement of our different programs and colleges. We’re hoping ePortfolios are a panacea.”
Villanova’s Education department is offering the new ePortfolio service to future elementary and secondary school teachers. Because an increasing number of state certification boards are requiring teachers to submit ePortfolios to receive their credentials, the technology is as much a way to help students prepare for the job search in the future as it is an assessment tool during their school years.
For the Political Science department, McGee and his colleagues built an assessment-only program, the Direct Response Folio (DRF), which requires students to submit artifacts (i.e., text, audio, and video files) to prove they’ve fulfilled certain goals. The goal of the DRF is not just teacher review of student work, but peer-to-peer review as well. Students are encouraged to review and give feedback on each other’s portfolios in addition to the teacher’s comments.
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