E-Portfolios at Your Institution
Johns Hopkins has conducted several eportfolio pilots and is preparing to report on the outcomes with a recommendation on next steps. We'd like to include summaries of eportfolio initiatives at other institutions in the report. If your institution employs eportfolios, would you be willing to reply with the following information?
*Brief overview of how eportfolios are used by faculty and students
*Scope of adoption
*Challenges encountered (aka Lessons Learned)
-- Mike Reese , Johns Hopkins
Andrea Phelps, Carleton College
"1 & 2. Carleton College has eportfolios for the Educational Studies program, which is a fairly small department. They are used primarily by the student teachers, as a combination of the three main categories of eportfolios: Learning, Credential, and Showcase. The main intent is for the portfolios to be Credential, but the professors want the other aspects present as well.
3. Most of the problems we have encountered relate to time and effort: our student teachers are not given the time to really learn how to utilize the more in-depth web tools and have no idea of how to do even basic coding. As a result, they were using a Word HTML template until this year, which is full of problems and was corrupting every time they saved the file. We have now switched to eFolioMN, which is free to Minnesota students and residents, and is simple enough for them to grasp in the short time they have to learn an eportfolio tool, yet allows for a reasonable amount of customization and access control. "
Otto Khera, USC
"* Porfolios Overview: For us, we have been evaluating Blackboard's ePortfolio system connected to its (Xythos) Content Management System. While it's fairly useful in terms of ease-of-use and robustness, the Bb (and likely other course management system-based eportfolios) remain fairly unexciting for the student -- the very person who is interested and has a meaningful stake in how the portfolio represents the person!
As such, we are currently settling on a combination of the Blackboard CMS (Learning System) together with the Movable Type blog, whereby Blackboard serves as the final repository and system of record for digital artifacts (primarily text) and the blog serves as the value-add for the student, and the incentive for producing authentic works -- works that are vetted by knowledge experts and therefore subject to the kind of peer review that encourages quality over quantity and rote fulfillment of assignments.
IDEALLY we at USC would like to leverage Google Apps as an eportfolio tool. Imagine the 'Groups' connected to the enrollment system, and also connected to Blogger, Picasa, Jotspot (now Sites), Mobile, together with the current Apps tools (Gmail, Calendar, IM/GoogleTalk, iGoogle).
We did also look briefly at TaskStream which is used by the California State University system, and others including Otis .. the pricing was too steep and the product was too limited/self contained.
* Scope of Adoption: In the first iteration, we are hoping to include a sizable chunk of the 2000 students who participate in a semester in the College Writing Program. There are 110 sections, each with circa 17 students. Thus, the work flow is critical.
*Challenges/Lessons Learned -- None yet -- but it is likely that students need systems that are portable and enduring beyond the institutional use."
Leysa M. Hassall, IA State
"*Brief overview of how ePortfolios are used by faculty and students: The eDoc electronic portfolio system at ISU features custom-built electronic portfolio templates (we call them "themes"), that are user-driven and designed by participating academic units (Departments, programs, student organizations, etc). Our system is built on open source software and based on uPortal. eDoc electronic portfolios are used for a variety of purposes depending on the academic unit by whom and for whom a theme was developed. eDoc portfolios are used for learning, advisory, course, accreditation, assessment and employment purposes. More information is located here:
http://www.celt.iastate.edu/edoc/
*Scope of adoption differs depending on the participating unit. Our most mature participant, the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition who has implemented ePortfolios across their curriculum boasts of about 800 student users (see more in the attached presentation).
*Challenges encountered - several in fact.
Firstly, our portfolios are created by users, therefore we are constantly reminded of the importance of the participatory design. Our programmer, Dr. Pete Boysen, created a so-called hot potato process that serves as a guide for designing teams. More details can be found here http://www.editlib.org/INDEX.CFM?fuseaction=Reader.PrintAbstract&paper_i d=24798 .
Electronic portfolio development calls for embedded curriculum.
Electronic portfolio development requires active participation of students, faculty members, administrators, and other stakeholders
Electronic portfolios require leveraging grassroots and administrative support (this is actually supported by several researchers). "
Teresa Franklin, Ohio State
"We are using LiveText to prepare standards based portfolio for assessment and to present to our state and national accrediting bodies. Students are implementing the typical kinds of documents to demonstrate the meeting of the standards within their specific discipline as well as the OU College of Education standards and the Ohio Department of Education standards for Teacher Preparation.
All education majors including, technology, counseling, higher education, educational admin have to have a exit portfolio which is a compilation of 4 years of work -- (we start early!)
We had difficulty developing the rubrics to assess the work which would make everyone happy! In the beginning, the faculty somehow thought that students would just know how to create a portfolio and to determine what would go in the portfolio and what wouldn't. So the first year of two was a struggle to come to a common understanding of what really was meant by a 'standards" based portfolio. -- we still have lapses in that area as faculty come and go. We had an extensive 2 year study and tried out several efolio software packages for 2 years before implementing. With NCATE demanding more and more information from us for accreditation, this seems to help us get organized and capture many of the items needed. Our students actually are now trained to use the software and about the process as they enter the college of ed."
André Séguin, Univ. of Ottawa
"Portfolio overview:
The University of Ottawa has been experimenting with e-portfolios with 9 pilot projects over the last 3 years. Our first solution to be tested was the iWebfolio from Nuventive. Our larger groups were, students for our Occupational Therapist program (140), students from our Human Kinetics program (100), our Career Services also looked at how the use of the e-portfolio could impact on their service offer.
We also looked at the open source solution from Sakai, with little success. This solution was more of a LMS than a portfolio. Now we are looking at the Blackboard solution for our Nutrition program. We anticipate about 40 - 50 students in the first year. We have just begun exploring the eFolio solution developed by the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities.
Scope of adoption
Our Occupational group decided to try developing a portfolio on a memory key for the next year. The rational beings that the solutions proposed were too technologically demanding for profs and students. Other groups will continue to experiment with solutions like Blackboard for the next year.
Challenges
The main challenge found was the limited knowledge of the use of the e-portfolio in teaching. For the next year we plan to develop more training to profs on the following objectives: Understanding what e-portfolio can do in pedagogical approach, show potential use of e-portoflio and demystify the technological aspect. We will also offer guidance to students to better understand the long-term benefits of a portfolio. Providing time to profs is also a major issue."
Nicole Gray, Adobe
Here’s an option to investigate:
Wednesday, July 9 11:00 a.m. PDT
Enhanced Portfolios for Education using Acrobat 9
Learn how Acrobat 9 enables students and faculty to easily organize and collect information from a variety of sources into a rich PDF Portfolio, collaborate and share documents and portfolios in real time and collect and manage feedback into a single PDF document.
http://www.adoberegistrations.com/education/Acrobat9Seminars2008_06/tabi...
