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E-Portfolio Portfolios are
collections of student work over time (within a given course or across a
number of courses within a given program of study). Each portfolio is a
demonstration of student accomplishment in responding (more narrowly) to the course
goals and (more broadly) to the program goals. In essence, the portfolio is
hard evidence of the student's contribution to and experience of a given
course or program and is considered a direct means of programmatic
assessment. (For a detailed description of the values and norms
inherent in the use of portfolios, see The e-portfolio differs
from the text-based portfolio in a couple of significant ways - one, in the
way it is generated, and, two, in the way it is distributed. In the first
case, the e-portfolio is developed on a webpage, which enables it to take
advantage of appropriate use of multimedia in the packaging of course
content. Students can provide audio or video reflections on those areas
of their work that they selected as representative of their experience within
a course or program in light of the course or program goals they have to
prove they have addressed. In addition to providing links to the work they
upload to their sites, students may also provide interpretive contexts for
external links to various entities online that supported their
work. In the second case, the e-portfolio is universally accessible
to those responsible for its review, and this includes a student's peers and
a program's review board. The semi-public nature of the e-portfolio increases
student attentiveness to its development as a self-evaluation designed to be
used as an institutional assessment tool. When we ask our students
to develop e-portfolios, we're actually asking them to do two things - the
first is to demonstrate a facility with the various technologies necessary to
post materials online, and the second is to collate examples of their
learning that evidence their responsiveness to the course (and, ultimately,
program) goals. At the beginning of a given course (or program), then,
students have to be told that this portfolio will be a portion of their
course (or program) requirement and that it will merely entail the gathering
and packaging of evidence specific to the course goals. Students will pay
much more attention to their course goals (and their relation to the program
goals) if they have this in mind, and they'll actually be the ones
collecting much of the assessment data for the instructor (or dean) to use
within the context of course or institutional assessment. Students will also
develop a stronger understanding of the relevance of any given course to the
overall program in which they're involved and of the overall program to the
vocation for which they're studying. This week, we want to
discuss what it is we might do with an e-portfolio (within a given course
offering and over successive course offerings) and some simple methods by
which to bring it about and to assess it (both while it is in process and
when it is submitted as a final product). Keep an eye on the instructional
design board and on one another's reflections on the readings. Dr. Sebastian
Mahfood |