Prepare some inviting questions.

The College of Education faculty and administrators needed an ePortfolio because of increasing demands from the Commonwealth of Virginia to demonstrate students’ and graduates’ competencies.

Others have called for faculty to render explicit in the classroom the typically hidden ways of thinking and doing by disciplinary experts–not simply to model expertise but to shift students from recipients of others’ meaning-making to agents of their own meaning-making

Believe it or not, the people you interact with have as much of an impact on your education and mental well-being as the worksheets you diligently tackle, the essays you write, and the textbook chapters you’re assigned to absorb. So how do we create opportunities outside of traditional tools? Where can students collaborate and learn from a variety of different professionals?

EPortfolio (Digital Portfolio) Rubric

Purpose and Pedagogy: A Conceptual Model for anePortfolio

ePortfolio Pedagogy

What Difference Does ePortfolio Make?

“Education on all levels has to move from packaging to probing, from the mere convey-ing of data to the experimental discovering of new dimensions of experience. The search will have to be for patterns of experience and discovery of principles of organization which have universal application, not for facts. ... It is the orientation of the society that matters, and our whole world, in shifting from the old mechanical forms to the new electronic feed-back forms, has already shifted from data packaging to probing of patterns.” (McLu-han, 1966, 38)

This paper highlights four themes arising out of research that is underway within an international framework of collaboration between the University of Edinburgh, the University of British Columbia and the University of Waterloo.

ePortfolios enable social pedagogies, providing an intermediate space between public and private. ePortfoliosareparticularlywell-suitedforsociallearninginteractionsbecausetheycanbesituatedasintermediatespaces,somewherebetweenentirelyprivateandtotallypublic.GuidedbyfacultystudentsrehearsewhatitmeanstoconnectwithanaudienceandconsiderwhattheirePortfoliolooksliketoothers.InventingwaysinwhichePortfolioscanserveassitesforcommunication,collaboration,andexchangeisasignificanttaskfortheePortfoliofieldasawhole.

Given this necessity, assessment management systems will most likely be a part of campus life from now on. But don't call them "ePortfolios." They are assessment management systems, or what a friend said really should be called "accreditation management systems," and most likely they are not designed to support the learning values traditionally associated with portfolios.

Rather than think of these two instantiations of the portfolio idea as a duality, however, let's separate out "ePortfolios" by their purpose and function: learning portfolios, advising portfolios (or student development portfolios), student showcase portfolios, assessment management systems, and other varieties of portfolios such as patient portfolios used in specialized situations. "ePortfolio" is the de-facto umbrella term but should not be confused with any one of the varieties of ePortfolio uses.

The electronic Personal Development Plan (ePDP) is a tool for helping students engage in a process that facilitates greater understanding of who they are and enables them to set meaningful goals

In terms of promotion the problem is the people trying to explain it [the eportfolio] have probably never used it so in a way they have no clue what they are talking about, basically. To put it frankly – after listening to them you would be like, Okay so you as an outsider who never even used it is telling us we should do this because it is the best thing since sliced bread but you have never used it – you can’t find someone who did use it – you don’t have enough information to tell us how to use it – and now you’re telling us use it and we’ll grade you on it – this kind of makes it hard for students to accept or appreciate it.

s. When ePortfolios are focused on process rather than product alone (i.e., how students have made sense of ideas over time), they can become a tool for identifying and supporting metacognition, allowing students to look into their prior, current, and post-educational experiences and “to talk across them, to connect them, totrace the contradictions among them, and to create a contingent sense of them” (Yancey, 2009,

ly, research on the relationship of performance, self-efficacy, and metacognition has shown that undergraduate students with mastery goals (i.e., goals to master a particular subject), rather than simply performance goals (i.e., goals to simply perform well on a test), will have a higher GPA; the students with these mastery goals also tend to have higher metacognitive awareness (

Luther and Barnes (2015) stated that one purpose of the ePortfolio for their students is to “reflect upon developmental growth and skill application” (p. 27). It is clear here that the researchers aim to encourage students to demonstrate their metacognitive abilities in their ePortfolios; evidence of this is referred to as “reflective statements” in their assessment rubric (Luther & Barnes, 2015, p. 33). Later, they stated that educators should “teach and model the use of a feedback and refl

This study explores the possibility of gaining a more holistic view of student learning, especially metacognition, through ePortfolio analysis and shows that ePortfolios can be discussed and assessed across programs and units of the universi

students and faculty need a domain of their own, an online space they control to curate and present their work in ways that are consistent with the values and commitments of their research

E-portfolios: A “filing cabinet in dialogue.”

They create their portfolios, not just in their specialty — which if it’s in software, might be creative-writing software programs or robotics — but it’s well beyond their specialty, their portfolio of writing, their portfolio of creative art projects, their portfolio of speeches they’ve given. When they graduate, instead of saying, "Hey, I have a magna cum laude GPA, blah, blah, blah, blah in this major," you’ll say, "Here’s my portfolio," and your portfolio is going to be one-third just of really well created things that you’re most proud of. There will be some assessment of what are the academic concepts that you’ve truly mastered.

Elon University is continuing development on its Experiences Transcript, which shows student involvement in extracurricular activities such as interning, service and study abroad. The university is working on a digital version of that transcript, which Green said resembles “a large infographic.”

When initiating e-portfolio projects, campuses often begin by deciding on a specific technology to support e-portfolios. Common criteria for such technologies include cost and ease of use, but as recent research demonstrates, another criterion is equally important: the ways the technology is programmatically formative. Although e-portfolios are not themselves about technology, any technology—be it the common tool, the open source software, the homegrown system, the commercially available e-portfolio tool, or the Web 2.0 social network—is a “structured system” (Johnson 2009) and will permit or support certain kinds of activities and preclude others. Penn State University’s research on electronic portfolios provides an excellent example of how this works. The Penn State team initially hoped for a single e-portfolio “enterprise solution,” but increasingly found a disconnect between their interest in institutional program assessment and their equally important commitment to fostering student dialogue and participation.

In other words, the Penn State original plan for e-portfolios consisted of finding an enterprise system solution that would support learning for all students while at the same time providing an administrative ‘back door’ through which an aggregation of rich assessment data related to learning could be harvested. Such a hypothetical system to satisfy all these needs is untenable (Johnson 2009)

(1) program-specific learning outcome templates for MovableType, which supports student e-portfolio activity and dialogue; (2) backtrack to e-portfolios from student resume samples, which supports internal student reflection on artifacts seen in multiple contexts (course, program, and employment) that can prompt new engagement and learning; and (3) an assessment management system, which provides faculty the opportunity to identify and tag key learning artifacts. In this more differentiated approach, the selection of technologies is more than rhetorical.

Because students create the e-portfolios under investigation, researchers can turn to them for insight into the effects of creating an e-portfolio, including the role e-portfolios play in teacher education candidates’ understanding of assessment (e.g. at the University of Nebraska–Omaha [Topp and Goeman]), or the reasons for the connections among artifacts (e.g. by Clemson psychology students [Stephens 2009]). Put simply, students’ explanations, whether through reflective commentary or interviews, provide a window into the e-portfolio experience.

“have already proven that they have the knowledge to answer specific questions by passing their classes, but it is just as important for them to demonstrate that they can make connections among those things they have learned. This is where I believe the value of the e-portfolio lies” (Weaver 2005)

The FSU career e-portfolio, like several e-portfolio models, isn’t limited to academic courses. Rather, it provides space for learning to occur in three areas: (1) curricular situations, which are largely course-based; (2) cocurricular situations, which are often linked to the curriculum (e.g., service learning opportunities, internships, peer tutoring, and leadership experiences); and (3) extracurricular situations (e.g., jobs, sports activities, etc.). The matrix structure FSU uses to foster this multicontextual thinking—what FSU calls a Skills Matrix—resembles the general education matrix created at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).

A persistent, progressive profile that builds a universal transcript

Reclaim the Portfolio