Hurdling Toward Campuswide E-Portfolios

Some ambitious institutions are seeking to implement e-portfolios across all departments and disciplines, yet there are many barriers to overcome before such a practice gets the full participation of faculty, staff, and students.

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 09/01/10

When Gail Ring sat down with students in her first year on the faculty at Clemson University, she'd ask them, "What do you think of the portfolio program?" As the new director of the e-portfolio initiative for the South Carolina school, she had a vested interest in their responses. Almost unanimously they'd reply, "How do you seriously expect us to do anything with this portfolio if our professors don't mention it?"

Clearly, course integration needed to be improved. Ring also heard that advisers were clueless about portfolios. "In some cases advisers were saying, 'Don't even talk to me about it,'" Ring recalls. Although Clemson had introduced the e-portfolio as an undergraduate requirement, it had quickly become something only the students--not the faculty or staff--were apparently supposed to worry about.

Ring's experience at Clemson illustrates that the old adage, "easier said than done," applies in spades to an institutional mandate on e-portfolios. Yet, despite resistance from faculty, staff, and students, and the sheer magnitude of the effort from a technological and management point of view, some campuses are shifting portfolios away from department-specific initiatives to become institution-wide programs.

The move seems to be driven--at heart--by institutions wanting to focus more deeply and systemically on providing evidence of student mastery of learning outcomes for every area of study, something that all regional higher education accreditation agencies, in fact, expect a school to do as a part of the accreditation process.

Yet there is no requirement that a college or university use portfolios (electronic or otherwise) to provide such evidence. The accrediting agencies allow various types of assessments to demonstrate mastery, including capstone tests and assignments, licensure examinations, and student performances, as well as portfolios. Not surprisingly, many higher ed institutions do use portfolios for selected areas of study, and e-portfolios, in particular, are emerging as an optimal way to manage these collections of student work over time.

But institutions like Clemson and Virginia Tech believe that integrating e-portfolios into a campuswide assessment system is, as Ring puts it, "the most effective way to assess our students' understanding of [key] competencies." So these schools are taking on the laborious challenge of implementing e-portfolios across departments, colleges, and disciplines. They believe these efforts are creating a student-centered learning environment that will transform the educational experience at their universities.