Context
This presentation addresses the challenges of ePortfolio implementation within a fully online environment, including: faculty development and buy-in from a largely adjunct faculty, fully online technical support for faculty and student users, and integration of ePortfolio assignments with an existing LMS platform.
ePortfolios have been in use at CUNY School of Professional Studies (SPS) since 2008, but ePortfolio adoption has been slow, with only a handful of dedicated instructors using ePortfolio in their courses. In Fall 2010 a new phase of implementation began with a new SPS leadership team and affiliation with the Connect to Learning Project, a 22 campus program to explore and strengthen best practices in ePortfolio pedagogy, coordinated by LaGuardia Community College (CUNY), and the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-based Learning (AAEEBL), a professional association focused on ePortfolio practice. Our initial focus is on ePortfolios for integrative learning, providing a space where students can create a visual record of their learning, connecting coursework with life and work experience in a portfolio that can be shared with classmates, instructors, family, and prospective employers or graduate school admissions offices.
Approach/Goals
Based on our earlier implementation experience, we identified three focus areas for broad-based ePortfolio implementation in our fully online environment:
•Faculty and Student Buy In: Making ePortfolio purposeful, not just "another thing to do " is central to our faculty development work. ePortfolio should be an author-managed environment in which students can integrate and reflect upon their learning experiences across courses; however, the danger is that online students will perceive ePortfolio as "busywork," and resent having to negotiate another layer of technology on top of the LMS. For faculty, ePortfolio offers an opportunity to design or redesign assignments to incorporate scaffolding, integration of multimedia, and opportunities for student reflection and metacognition. But again, we have to overcome perceptions that using ePortfolio will be extra work or will take away time from content instruction.
•Ease of Use: Best practices in ePortfolio implementation point to dedicated ePortfolio labs or dedicated lab hours, staffed with advanced student mentors, who can assist faculty and students in ePortfolio course sections with the nuts and bolts of ePortfolio creation/website development. With student and faculty at a distance, drop-in, hands-on assistance is not possible, so we have had to brainstorm ways to engage ePortfolio users in the process without making the technology a barrier to access. Particular focus has been paid to the potential awkwardness of navigating between the LMS platform and the ePortfolio platform.
•Course-based Implementation and Assessment: Although we hope eventually to achieve institution-wide ePortfolio implementation and to use ePortfolio for program assessment, our initial focus is course-based implementation through design of signature assignments linked to course learning objectives. Developing and successfully deploying these signature assignments in targeted first-year courses has been the focus of our faculty development efforts to date.
Two speakers will discuss the issues outlined above, share strategies that we have implemented to address them, present preliminary assessment outcomes, and engage the audience in a discussion of the benefits and challenges of ePortfolio implementation in a fully online learning environment.
