The Diversifier

Farther south, technologists at the University of Iowa are honing their own homegrown ePortfolio systems. Via an overarching electronic portfolio project, students in the school’s College of Education are treated to four different flavors of ePortfolios. The flagship initiative at Iowa—Digital BackPack—is a system that, much like UMD’s, provides a series of individual repositories into which every student can store files.

On the surface, each portfolio is nothing more than a glorified Web page to organize presentations, documents, and images for others to peruse. Behind the scenes, however, the Digital BackPack is an elaborate, homegrown content management system, a place for students to store all the evidence of their education and curriculum-driven conceptualizing.

Not surprisingly, many students use the resumes and work samples in their ePortfolios to look for work. Once they’re hired, the Digital Backpack becomes what technologists call the Cyber Toolbox, which remains active after graduation and enables students to store lesson plans and professional utilities early in their careers. Rebecca Anthony, director of Placement, says that many first- and second-year Iowa teachers use the toolbox as a homepage for enrichment activities—a place to post a summer reading list, and a means to communicate with their parents. John Achrazoglou, director of the college’s Education Technology Center, notes that these sites stay active for three years after graduation, at which time the university strongly encourages students to find a local Internet Service Provider(ISP) to host their ePortfolios.

“Right now, we’ve got more than 4,300 portfolios with 500,000 files sitting on our servers,” says Achrazoglou. “While we want to encourage students to use this technology, at some point we’ve got to wean them off of our servers in order to keep the space available for others.”

Benefits for Faculty

Extending the Technology for Life approach that so many schools embrace, Iowa’s other ePortfolio efforts exist to help established educators incorporate the technology into their everyday lives. One model, the Ph.D. Professional ePortfolio, mirrors the Digital BackPack, yet is designed specifically for students studying for doctoral degrees. Another model, the Early Career Teacher ePortfolio, provides ePortfolios to every teacher in the state. This third approach is the result of a partnership with the Cedar Rapids Community School District and the Cedar Rapids Education Association. Based on eight standards and 42 performance criteria, Achrazoglou and colleagues developed an ePortfolio template that revolutionizes the tenure process. Assessment of early teachers seeking standard licensure is now done through an ePortfolio instead of via paper-based files, the method previously used. Thanks to a $215,000 grant from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust ( www.carvertrust.org), teachers can download the template for free.

The fourth and final flavor of ePortfolio technology at the university debuted in August 2005. Known as the Leadership ePortfolio, this effort represents the biggest partnership to date: a collaboration with the Cedar Rapids Community School District, School Administrators of Iowa, and the Iowa Association of School Boards to deliver ePortfolios designed specifically for principals and other district administrators. The templates for these portfolios are based upon six standards and 36 performance criteria. Anthony says that much like the templates for the Early Career Teacher ePortfolio, these leader-oriented tools have begun to change the way Iowa reviews administrators and grants them promotions. Now, she adds, all the university needs is user cooperation statewide.

“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.

“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.

McGee admits that student response to these pilot programs has been tepid so far, but technologists are confident that as the program matures, so too will its user base. Elsewhere in the university, faculty are more enthusiastic. Representatives from the College of Engineering recently expressed interest in building an ePortfolio program specifically for this year’s incoming freshmen, to help them build an online repository for every document and spreadsheet they create during their time on campus. Other departments have expressed an interest in the technology as well, according to Cathy Kolongowski, Instructional Technology analyst.

Kolongowski recalls that when Villanova first rolled out WebCT (www.webct.com) in 1999, users were slow to adapt to the new technology at first, but ultimately embraced it wholeheartedly. “People generally are fearful of change,” she says. “But just as our users eventually embraced WebCT, I predict ePortfolios will become second nature before we know it, too.”

The Rookie

The future is even brighter for technologists at St. Lawrence University, where a recent implementation of ANGEL ePortfolio from Angel Learning (www.angellearning.com) kicked off in May 2005. Technologists at the small liberal arts school had been looking for a way to modernize and standardize the assessment system and provide students with a place to keep all of the files they create during their time in school.

After being approached by Angel Learning in January 2005, IT System Administrator Jedediah Hock says the school agreed to beta test the technology. The school tried out the Angel Learning tool in one small course, and feedback was excellent. One month later, St. Lawrence had inked a contract to roll out the technology on a broader scale.

This month, Hock and other technologists will introduce ePortfolio technology to 250 freshmen and 15 faculty members. Interestingly, the university will rely on ePortfolios not only as a place for teachers to assess student progress in achieving learning goals of the program, but also as a site for reflection in the academic planning process. The template for the new ePortfolios includes an area that closely resembles the current-day blog—an area where students will be encouraged to share insights with others and invite feedback from classmates, so they can work through issues together. By encouraging students to blog about their experiences, St. Lawrence officials are hoping to learn as much about the process and the student experience as they will about student performance overall.

“One of the main reasons we’re using ePortfolios is because we think they will be useful for our students to draw connections between their coursework and their broader academic goals and plans,” Hock says. “Providing help in learning more effectively [comes with] connecting your life and learning experiences into a cohesive whole, and we are highly committed to new technologies that accomplish that goal.”