Digication is a web-based eportfolio software company that was created by two art educators, Jeffry Yan and Kelly Driscoll, both graduates of and faculty members at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), noted as one of the top art schools in the country. Driscoll and Yan also have extensive backgrounds in web application development, user interface design, and digital media, so it makes sense that they have created an eportfolio product and service that has become highly regarded for its ease of use; great-looking, customizable and intuitive interface; and its strong capability to easily store and display complex digital images and video files. Driscoll and Yan also have a strong community-building, social-networking, Web 2.0 kind of mindset that is helping to steer their product down interesting and highly creative educational pathways.

A CMS and Eportfolio Web-Based Software Solution
Digication got its start back in 2001/02 when Yan and Driscoll started to build some web-based tools for the classes they were teaching inside RISD’s Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program offered by the Department of Art + Design Education. MAT is a cohort teacher preparation program for artists and designers that culminates in recommendation for K-12 teacher certification.

In its first phase of development Digication was a basic course management system (CMS) that gave faculty the ability to post syllabi, assignments, announcements and online resources, as well as hold online discussions and use a grading module. The development of the eportfolio side of the Digication software came on the heels of the first phase. By 2004, the entire package of a basic CMS and eportfolio software solution, with an application service provider model and offering, was licensed commercially campus-wide at RISD.

How Otis College Uses Digication
Yan explains that by 2006, through word of mouth only, Digication was servicing about six institutional clients, one of which was the Otis College of Art and Design, a small private college in Los Angeles with about 1,125 students.

According to Sue Maberry, library director and assistant to the provost for instructional technology at Otis, Digication appealed to both students and faculty there because "it had been designed by artists and designers, and it looked beautiful." In addition, "all we needed was a kind of light course management system. We did not need anything quite so robust or expensive as a Blackboard or WebCT."

"The State Department of Education in Rhode Island required, as part of its accreditation process, that we archive all of our students’ work, and that we connect that work to standards," says Sproll. "So, we looked at the Digication technology as being a vehicle for making those things happen."

In the MAT program, for instance, the assessment of a candidate's performance across all coursework and a spectrum of experiences is evaluated in relationship to the Rhode Island Beginning Teacher Standards (RIBTS). MAT students demonstrate how they have met an acceptable level of proficiency in each of the RIBTS by posting items of evidence, in a variety of formats, inside a "Standards Matrix" that resides in their Digication eportfolios.

Posting to standards is the "program eportfolio" component of an MAT student’s culminating "Degree Project." When students post their work to their program eportfolios, they are required to also post a reflection concerning how the work connects to the standards. "We ask our students to think very carefully about why they have posted something," says Sproll.

Two other components of the Degree Project are a teaching eportfolio and a degree project exhibition. The teaching eportfolio is a professionally compiled documentation of the MAT student’s instructional design and teaching skills, including an evaluation of his or her teaching performance at the elementary and secondary levels. The degree project exhibition is an interpretive process that showcases two significant lessons taught during student teaching, one each at the elementary and secondary level.

Degree Project Takes on New Dimension
Students completing their Degree Project must also participate in a conference with two of their cooperating teachers (one elementary and one secondary), two RISD faculty members and an external reviewer. The conference is held in a classroom that allows the student to project his or her work, all archived in their Digication eportfolios, onto an overhead screen.

Prior to the conference students created QuickTime recordings of their teaching experiences that have been housed inside their eportfolios. In these recordings students talk about their work and include shots of the classrooms they taught in along with overview shots and interviews with some of the elementary and secondary students they worked with as teachers.

"It’s quite an extraordinary opportunity to have a conversation around their work," Sproll says. "We can see their work. We are able to capture the complexity of teaching and learning and the evidence of our students’ interaction with that in a way we were never able to do in the past."

Bigger and Wider Plans
After witnessing such progress and innovation occur in the MAT program, Coogan says he started to develop an academic plan for the entire college that would ramp up eportfolio adoption across campus. Students will collect, reflect and share their work inside Digication eportfolios over their college careers, and RISD will host an online environment where entire graduating classes could be archived. "We can then use that as a way of looking over a period of time at how we are doing in terms of outcomes that we expect our students to have. We could randomly go through and pick various student eportfolios, that include their written and visual work, and then look at them from their first year through their final year at RISD and see what kind of progress they made. Then we can look at them in comparison to other students in their department or in their classes.

"That’s where I’d like to see us go. That is going to require a number of things that are not in place right now, such as training faculty how to introduce this idea to students and having workshops for students to learn how to develop this as a routine."

A New Generation of Eportfolios
To successfully accomplish similar eportfolio-related goals, whereby large numbers of students routinely post, reflect, share and build communities around their academic coursework, Yan and Driscoll believe that the emphasis on assessment, while important, needs to be framed more specifically within the context of teaching and learning. "If an eportfolio is just a collection mechanism for the purpose of assessment, there’s nothing for the student from a learning point of view or from an engagement point of view," Yan says. "There is really nothing to motivate them to do it except that they were asked to do it. Students will not treat it like it is an enjoyable, motivating and engaging process."

Yan claims that some of the early promises of eportfolios, in general, were framed too strongly around assessment tools. Instead, "it is really the building of community that makes eportfolios sticky and provides value for people."

He compares these notions to the way people use Web 2.0 applications, such as Flickr, Facebook and YouTube, as avenues to reveal their creativity. "For us (producing an eportfolio) ought to be as easy as uploading a movie to YouTube or a photo to Flickr. We focus on being able to allow for our users to do that, so we don’t put in too rigid of a structure."

Yan adds that he is finding that the current growth of eportfolio adoption has brought about very exciting times for his company as well as for teachers and learners. "The very act of showcasing and sharing work actually addresses many learning and pedagogical opportunities that were not available before. While we believe in assessment and accountability, we also believe that eportfolios have more potential to really address the needs of teachers and learners."