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

Like the UMass schools, many colleges and universities have adopted ePortfolios gradually. Instead of embracing the tools campuswide, these institutions have rolled them out in a handful of departments first. This was the strategy at Iowa State University, where more than 1,000 students in a number of different departments now use the technology. At Iowa State, the ePortfolio system (“eDoc”) is an outgrowth of JA-SIG’s uPortal, the open source version of the standard campus web portal. (For more on open source and ePortfolios, see “The Open Source Approach”) Since the technology was introduced in 2004, Iowa State technologists also have linked it with WebCT Vista (a Blackboard company), so students can move course-based artifacts into their repositories.

"ePortfolios allow us to accumulate information that is instrumental for the student, the individual faculty member, the dean, and so on, up the ladder."

Mark Schlesinger, University of Massachusetts

The driving force behind eDoc is Pete Boysen, senior systems analyst in the IT Services department. Boysen says the impetus for the project was a combination of wanting students to take a bigger role in their professional development and the pressure from outside agencies for departments to demonstrate competence in learning outcomes. One example: The Food Science and Human Nutrition department uses electronic portfolios for all of its students, in order to track student competencies against pre-established learning outcomes from the American Dietetic Association. Boysen says that dietetic interns are required to note in their portfolios when certain outcomes are accomplished.

“The key idea was to custom-build departmental and general ‘themes’ to meet each department’s requirements,” he says, adding that students in the Educational Leadership and Policy Study and Math Education departments track performance against similarly preestablished outcomes. “The customized approach eDoc provides has given us the flexibility to meet all of these needs.”

Widespread Adoption

While ePortfolio technology is used by only a handful of students at Iowa State, every student at Wesleyan University graduates with an ePortfolio these days. At this small liberal arts school, the ePortfolio initiative is referred to as EP. The Class of 2001 was the first class to graduate with electronic portfolios; today, every student must have one. Students can use the system to access personalized academic information and reports on academic history; they also can use EP to take language and math placement tests and check on their placement recommendations.

But the benefits don’t stop there. On the administrative side, students can participate in the housing lottery and submit evaluations of their resident advisers. On the personal side, students can use space provided to reflect on their academic goals or future plans, and customize their ePortfolios by adding RSS feeds of interest from the web. Technologists at Wesleyan have even programmed the tool so students can use it to interface with the school’s Blackboard content management system.

According to Jennifer Curran, functional project manager of the EP program, just about the only problem with the system thus far has been unchecked growth. “We are adding so many applications to our portfolios that it is becoming cluttered,” she says, adding that looking forward, “organizing [these applications] properly is going to be a challenge.”