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UPDATE ON ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIOS
To
get a sense of where the world of
electronic portfolios (ePortfolios)
is heading, Educational Pathways
conducted the following interview
with Darren Cambridge, a Facilitator
for the Educause National Learning
Infrastructure Initiative (NLII)
Electronic Portfolios Community of
Practice and Director of Web
Projects for the American
Association of Higher Education (AAHE).
Cambridge is also Chair of an IMS
special interest group on
ePortfolios,
EP: How is IMS getting involved
with ePortfolios?
Cambridge:
We are now in the process of
developing a scope of work which
should be done this month defining a
particular specification development
project, and then that will be voted
on by the IMS technical board, and
then a technical team over about six
months will develop a specification.
We have someone from IBM, someone
from Blackboard, Penn State, UC
Berkeley, VirginiaTech, and the
Center for Recording Achievement in
the UK – they have done a lot of
good work in the UK with using the
IMS learner information profile
standard and extending that to
support what they call in the UK a
personal development record, which
is very similar to an ePortfolio. We
have decided that we are not going
to try to deal with interoperability
of electronic portfolios systems
with student information systems,
course management systems, learning
content management systems and all
that sort of thing. What we are
working on is the portability of
ePortfolios.
EP: How quickly are ePortfolio
technologies being adopted in higher
education?
Cambridge:
It’s growing exponentially. I try to
keep up on everything that is going
on and it seems like I hear about
ten new places each day that are
developing their own system or have
been using something for two years
that I have no idea about.
EP: Where are ePortfolio
technologies being adopted in higher
education?
Cambridge:
ePortfolios are being used in
professional disciplines where it is
a lot easier to define sets of
competencies that you need to
demonstrate that learners have
achieved. Teacher ed is probably the
biggest place where there is the
most penetration, but people are
doing it in engineering, and
increasingly in the health sciences.
For example, at the Rose-Hulman
Institute of Technology in Indiana
they have a very successful program
that has been going on for seven
years now. They are using it as a
way to find gaps in their curriculum
and whether or not they are
addressing the things that they
should be. It’s been a pretty
powerful model, and they have a very
good feedback group that has helped
to bring about institutional changes
based on what they have found out
from the portfolio assessment
process.
Another place that is focused on
competency-based assessment that is
a good model is Alverno College in
Milwaukee. It was easy for them
because, for 30 years, they have had
a curriculum based around assessment
and particular learning outcomes.
I think the competency-based
stuff almost by necessity has to be
centrally organized because everyone
has to agree on what those things
are. We are now seeing that beyond
the early examples, things have
spread to larger institutions. For
example, IUPUI is developing a
comprehensive system where they are
going to ask all their students to
demonstrate their competencies
across this set of undergraduate
learning principles that they
developed. |
