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E-Portfolios

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An ePortfolio, similar to a resume, is used to demonstrate skills, abilities, and achievements to potential employers. While a resume is a concise, one-to-two-page summary of skills and experience, an e-portfolio is a more extensive, multi-format collection of work samples, projects, and reflections. A strong ePortfolio can enhance a resume by providing concrete examples to back up the claims made on the resume. 

Developing and using an e-portfolio for your Bonner Program, campus center for civic engagement, or entire institution provides an avenue for:

• building a student (and employer) friendly strategy for students to take charge and initiative in shaping and articulating their own learning
• integrating curricular and co-curricular pathways
• breaking down boundaries and siloes
• developing and sustaining a culture of inquiry and learning
• ensuring the integration of outcome-based and competency-oriented teaching and learning - including tied to civic engagement 

Much of this resonates strongly with the goals, structure, and developmental nature of the Bonner Program and our broader aspirations.

The integration of e-portfolios can provide a vehicle for driving integration across curriculum and co-curriculum, academic and student affairs, departments and centers, and the undergraduate (and even graduate) experience. According Randy Bass, Vice Provost for Education at Georgetown University and Senior Researcher for the Connect to Learning Project, "E-portfolios are at heart a set of pedagogies and practices that link learners to learning, curriculum to the co-curriculum, and courses and programs to institutional outcomes." Bass' "Connect to Learning" project involved 24 campuses in developing an integrative e-portfolio. 

As Bass noted in "The Next Whole Thing in Higher Education," published in AAC&U's Peer Review (Winter 2014, Vol. 16, No. 1):

E-portfolios are change agents; they belong to an emergent learning paradigm and, as we argue in the Connect to Learning Project, have the capacity to catalyze change toward that paradigm. They do this in at least three crucial ways that are profoundly necessary at this potentially disruptive and disintegrative moment in higher education:

1. E-portfolios provide a mechanism for integrative learning; they give students a way to make connections across courses and experiences in order to create a whole greater than the sum of the curricular parts. As the options for acquiring isolated and decontextualized educational experiences proliferate, the need to support students in personalizing and contextualizing their learning is more crucial than ever. Indeed, emerging data suggests e-portfolio practice supports both improved student success (e.g. retention) and deep learning.

2. E-portfolios provide a means for integrating institutional measures of learning. Mature e-portfolio initiatives are sites of integrative assessment, bringing together student success and learning outcomes data in the context of authentic student work. Although the term “learning analytics” is often narrowly construed to refer only to data produced from virtual systems, e-portfolios epitomize the definition of learning analytics, as given by the Society for Learning Analytics Research: “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning, and the environments in which it occurs.

3. E-portfolios can provide a means for clarifying and affirming localized institutional value. As large portions of the curriculum become commodified, generic, and interchangeable, e-portfolios provide an unparalleled means for leveraging the impact of local high-impact educational practices and making visible the distinctive educational contributions of faculty, place, and the local community.

Lorenzo and Ittelson (2005) described e-portfolio as "a digitized collection of artifacts including demonstrations, resources, and accomplishments that represent an individual, group, or institution. This collection can be comprised of text- based, graphic, or multimedia elements archived on a Web site or on other electronic media such as a CD-ROM or DVD" (abstract). Today, there are many external e-portfolio providers with which an institution can work. These systems generally allow the institution (or program) to provide the learning outcomes and other intended aims and to customize the functionalities, look, and feel. When properly guided, the process of integrating an e-portfolio on campus can drive innovation and collaboration.

Today, e-portfolios have been used by hundreds of higher education institutions as a tool for documenting and assessing student learning (as well as teaching and programs). The AAC&U used e-portfolios in conjunction with its VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) initiative, launched in 2005. The VALUE Rubrics, including for Civic Engagement, have been used as a more authentic and competency-based strategy (i.e., than standardized tests) for student learning assessment. Through an e-portfolio, a student can take initiative to document his or her own work and learning, reflect and make connections, and share this work with others (such as potential employers, family, and community members). On the E-Portfolios  Campus Examples page, you will find links to some campuses and academic programs that have used e-portfolios in this way. 

While a few campuses in the Bonner network have used e-portfolios in conjunction with some majors or programs, campus-wide integration (especially that which is tied to civic and community engagement) has not really occurred. In the next several years, the Bonner Foundation would like to develop a multi-campus project through which several colleges and universities collaborate in the development of a campus-wide e-portfolio that also includes outcomes and learning tied to civic and community engagement. The Foundation will help to guide this process, inviting a number of campuses to work collaboratively. A model for this can be found in the "Catalyst for Learning" initiative, led by LaGuardia Community College, which involved 24 institutions. 

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