EPORTFOLIOS: WHO'S DOING WHAT?

There’s plenty of discussion, research and development and analysis going on about electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) these days. A simple Google or ERIC database search will easily put you in touch with an overwhelming amount of information about emerging ePortfolio technology and many of the current uses of ePortfolios.

Interviews conducted by Educational Pathways with some of the early adopters in this field portray ePortfolios as a rapidly evolving technology that will change higher education in many ways, with enormous implications for students, faculty, staff, and the way in which institutions themselves advance their objectives and goals.

In short, there are many educators and technologists working diligently inside the world of ePortfolios. This issue of Educational Pathways summarizes many of the latest developments and issues surrounding this relatively new and exciting use of technology in education.

A Basic Definition
For a basic definition of ePortfolios, and more, Educational Pathways spoke with Helen Barrett, an assistant professor on leave from the University of Alaska Anchorage School of Education, who is currently working as co-director of a PT3 grant, part of which is an International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) initiative called Supporting Technology and Assessment in Teacher Education (STATE). As part of this initiative, Barrett is working on creating an online clearinghouse on ePortfolios and performance assessment in teacher education to disseminate promising practices. Barrett defines ePortfolios by comparing them to financial portfolios. "A financial portfolio documents the accumulation of fiscal capital or monetary aspects," she says. "I just replace a few words in that definition and say an educational portfolio documents the accumulation of human capital or intellectual aspects." This accumulation of human capital inside a portfolio, which has been made electronic and posted on a server somewhere, or put on a CD-ROM, has to be a "purposeful collection" she says, adding that ePortfolios can have many different purposes.

Measuring Student Learning
John Ittelson is a facilitator of a virtual community of practice for an EDUCAUSE-sponsored National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) that is analyzing teaching and learning issues associated with ePortfolios. He explains that portfolios, in general, such as those typically created by teachers, artists and writers in both paper and electronic forms, are really nothing new. However, this new generation of ePortfolio technology, Ittelson says, has the potential of becoming a "more valid way of measuring student learning," and a replacement for the historic course-seat-time, learning-measurement model that many modern educators believe has become outdated.

Other Uses
Adding to Ittelson’s point of view is a multi-faceted movement led by numerous individuals and groups who see ePortfolios as an extremely vital brush stroke inside the big picture of lifelong learning (both online and traditional); teacher credentialing and certification; student, faculty and staff career development; pedagogical practices; and institutional accreditation processes.

Teacher Education
The most prevalent usage and research concerning ePortfolios can be found inside teacher education. One of the primary reasons for this is that in 2000 the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) came out with new standards requiring that technology be integrated across teacher education curriculums and that better assessment systems be established to provide "information about the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of their teacher candidates," says Barrett. Over the years, teacher education portfolios have been paper-based and put inside large three-ring binders. Since a good deal of the material put into these binders was initially created on computers, moving such information over to an ePortfolio format made the entire process easier to manage.

Many Home-Grown Systems
A good number of colleges and universities have built sophisticated ePortfolio systems. In particular, the University of Washington’s Catalyst Portfolio Tool for students and its Portfolio Project Builder for instructors are frequently mentioned as well-built models.

Another home-grown system that has gained a lot of positive recognition is a project called Folio Thinking out of the Stanford University Center for Innovations in Learning. In a Ready2Net broadcast titled "Teaching, Learning and Assessment with ePortfolios" recorded in October 2002, Helen Chen, Stanford Center research scientist, explains the core purpose of an ePortfolio: "Students need to take more responsibility for their learning and create a coherent and cohesive undergraduate or graduate education that is not just defined by what courses they have taken or what kind of grades they have received. They need to incorporate the kinds of things that are going on outside of the classroom into their education and then have that information documented [inside an ePortfolio], so that it can be shared."

Other engaging home-grown ePortfolio systems are currently in place at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Minnesota Duluth, Penn State University, and Portland State University, to name only a few. Two institutions that are noted as being the earliest adopters of campus-wide ePortfolio systems are Kalamazoo College in Michigan and Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

State-wide Initiative
eFolio Minnesota is another ePortfolio project well worth noting. The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System owns eFolio Minnesota, and it is powered by a tool developed by Avenet LLC, headquartered in St. Paul. It is stated on the eFolio Web site that "all Minnesota residents, including students enrolled in Minnesota schools, educators and others can use eFolio Minnesota to reach their career and education goals." In the same aforementioned Ready2Net broadcast, Gary Langer, associate vice chancellor, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, calls eFolio a system designed to be "lifelong for the digital learner of the 21st Century," adding that it has already begun to change the dynamics of employment interviews for State of Minnesota residents.

Analogous to the mid-90s CMS
Many of the people working with ePortfolios compare this movement to what happened in the mid-90s when course management systems (CMS) started to become a must-have technology at colleges and universities across the country. "What happened with course management systems was that they were developed fairly idiosyncratically by individuals, and in the heat of the dot-com boom, they turned into this incredible market," says Ittelson. "There is a concern that ePortfolios may start out like that, where there could be a rapid deployment that does not allow for enough discussion about pedagogical issues."

Two groups of educators and vendors that are at the forefront of seeking broad-based ePortfolio technology solutions that may eventually benefit all of higher education are the ePortConsortium and the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI).

ePortConsortium
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Professor Ali Jafari, who is a founding member of the ePortConsortium, and creator of an ePortfolio system at IUPUI called Epsilen Portfolios, says that like the CMS scene in the mid-90s, "there is a lot of excitement and a lot of confusion, and a lot of people are trying to see what they can do with ePortfolios. We formed ePortConsortium in order to come out with interoperability and transportability specifications."

As noted on its Web site, the ePortConsortium "is the collaboration of select higher education and IT institutions working to define, design, and develop software for the forthcoming electronic portfolio environment and system. From a conceptual perspective, we are trying to invent the new electronic portfolio application environment to address various ePortfolio needs. From the technical perspective, we intend to collaborate with IT institutions to define and adopt interoperability and transportability measures and standards while building prototypes to test scenarios and conceptual environments. If we are successful, the forthcoming electronic portfolio systems created by commercial software companies and those built by educational institutions will be compatible."

OSPI
"If ePortfolios are going to realize their potential, they have to be portable, and that means portable across any number of institutions and maybe even operating simultaneously across multiple institutions for an individual," adds Chris Coppola, an executive/technologist from a Web development group called the RSmart group, which is part of the core OSPI team that includes University of Minnesota and the University of Delaware.

As noted on its Web site, OSPI is facilitating "the development of an open source, individual-centric, lifelong electronic portfolio. We support the advancement of a robust, non-proprietary system built on standards that assure portability, longevity, and interoperability with other knowledge management systems."

Knowledge Media Lab
Another entity that is working on an open-source ePortfolio system solution is the Knowledge Media Laboratory (KML), a program of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Senior Scholar and Co-Director of the Lab, Toru Iiyoshi, explains that KML has been helping faculty scholars from the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) program document and share their teaching techniques and knowledge by using multimedia elements inside ePortfolios. KML has developed an online, template-driven ePortfolio-building tool, called the Knowledge Exchange Exhibit and Presentation (KEEP) Tool Kit that it plans to put inside an open-source environment by this Fall. "We plan to share design documents and the codes so that someone who has the same technical capacity can rebuild or adapt these tools," says Iiyoshi, adding that KML is currently working with OSPI.

Institutional ePortfolios
Another area being addressed by ePortfolio technology deals with institutions using ePortfolios for accreditation purposes. For instance, IUPUI built an institutional ePortfolio as part of the Urban Universities Portfolio Project (UUPP), which was a three-year (1998-2001) national collaboration that included six large urban public universities and the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) that was funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Much of the material currently in the ePortfolio has been developed as part of IUPUI’s accreditation self-study for the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

"I think that most institutions in a very short time will be doing a lot of their documentation through electronic portfolios," says Barbara Cambridge, a team leader on UUPP and vice president of fields of inquiry and action for AAHE.

Cambridge points to the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, which has made it a requirement for institutions to have ePortfolios. "Institutions are learning how to demonstrate progress toward student learning outcomes, their work with the community and their major research activities on their institutional ePortfolios," says Cambridge. "There is a major movement toward this with campuses in the Western region. I think it will not be long before this kind of representation of institutional life happens across all the accrediting bodies. I think it is a very exciting inevitability."

Cambridge is also an author of a popular book on ePortfolios published by AAHE, 2001, titled "Electronic Portfolios: Emerging Practices for Students, Faculty and Institutions."

Vendors
For-profit vendors solutions are another big piece of the ePortfolio pie. One company, TaskStream, has a very sophisticated ePortfolio management system used by a number of colleges of education. TaskStream bundles its ePortfolio system inside a suite of Web-Based services, including instructional design and collaboration tools. Other vendors in this space include Chalk and Wire, ePortaro, McGraw-Hill’s Folio Live, and NuVentive.

In Conclusion
Perhaps Carnegie’s Iiyosh best sums things up when he says that today’s higher education information technologists have basically two options to choose from when considering whether or not to invest in an ePortfolio system: Choose whatever is available right now, or wait "another year or two" for all these ePortfolio initiatives to further develop and improve. "Basically everybody is looking around to see who has the longest future and who has the truly integrated solutions," he says. "For CIOs and CTOs, it is a very tough decision to make."