Electronic Student Assessment: The Power of the Portfolio

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Electronic Student Assessment: The Power of the Portfolio

8/29/2006

By Matt Villano

The Open Source Approach

IS YOUR INSTITUTION already embracing open source? Then you should know that there’s an open source flavor of ePortfolio technology, as well—and it’s flourishing. The effort, the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSP), is a community of individuals and organizations collaborating on the development of non-proprietary open source electronic portfolio software.

Formed in January 2003 by the University of Minnesota, the University of Delaware, and The rSmart Group, the project is based on Portfolio, the University of Minnesota’s ePortfolio software. In 2004, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation matched contributions from Indiana University and rSmart to fund the development of OSP2.

Today, the OSP effort harnesses the creative work of these thought leaders, delivering it as a set of powerful tools that interoperate in the Sakai community source framework. The initiative strives to create and sustain ePortfolio software, build a software platform that accelerates ePortfolio innovation for education, and inspire best practices in portfolio thinking.

Specifically, in the academic environment, individual learners can use OSP as a repository to store and organize digital evidence of teaching and learning. Users can upload files of any type, organize them in folders, and reference them in presentations or compositions to share with a particular audience. Instructors can use the system to design guided reflective processes that help learners integrate and enhance what they have learned throughout the year. Further, the system provides instructors with a rich set of tools to design formative and summative assessments.

Finally, administrators can use the enterprise electronic portfolio system as a data-driven decisionmaking and reporting tool. Configured to align with institutional objectives, the OSP system collects real evidence of teaching and learning that can be correlated with and assessed against course, program, department, and institutional objectives.

Then and Now

In order to understand all that an ePortfolio can be, it’s important to look briefly at what the electronic tool was originally intended to be: a collection of electronic documents that demonstrate the owner’s skills, education, and knowledge to a target reader. In academia, instructors use ePortfolios to evaluate student competency in a particular subject. Today, most ePortfolio efforts fall into three main categories: developmental, reflective, and representational. While a developmental ePortfolio comprises a record of assignments over time, a reflective ePortfolio includes personal reflection on the content as well. A representational ePortfolio shows achievements in relation to particular work or developmental goals and is, therefore, selective. Importantly, these three main ePortfolio flavors may be mixed to achieve different learning, personal, or work-related outcomes. Across academia, at least according to Mark Schlesinger, associate VP for academic technology at the University of Massachusetts system, schools do just that.

“Technological approaches like ePortfolios offer better ways to collaborate on such things as development of standards and criteria, as well as measurement,” says Schlesinger, whose statewide network of schools has already implemented a few ePortfolio programs, and received nearly $200,000 in state and federal grants to develop a comprehensive electronic portfolio program over the next few years. “I see ePortfolios as a way to accumulate information that is instrumental for the student, the individual faculty member, the department chair, the dean, and so on, up the ladder.”