Ways to Teach ePortfolios

Teaching ePortfolios: The Beginning 

Tips and Tricks to get started:

1. Start at the beginning of your semester by introducing students to the ePortfolio so they keep in mind where to store artifacts and have time to experiment with technology.
2. Articulate the purpose behind ePortfolios and why they are useful to students. 
3. Do low-stakes assignments in the technology platform so students have a chance to practice. 
4. Draw on the expertise of folks around campus. You don't need to be a technology expert to teach ePortfolios! We are here to help!
5. Play around and create your own ePortfolio draft to anticipate student questions and inform your own learning. 
6. Have students reflect at the beginning of the course on their learning, personal, and professional goals and/or whatever you are hoping they get out of the course. They can then return to these throughout the semester and illustrate in their ePortfolios growth. 

Teaching ePortfolios: The Messy Middle 

There are some key concepts to teaching ePortfolios in the middle. These include peer review/feedback, reflection, and self-assessment. 

PEER REVIEW/FEEDBACK:

Throughout the creation of their ePortfolios students can provide feedback to each other. Peer Review is an essential way for students to practice giving constructive feedback, interpreting audience experience, understanding expectations, and seeing examples. We recommend doing at least one round of peer review for students' ePortfolios. Some guiding questions can include: 

1. As a viewer - how accessible is the ePortfolio? 
2. As a viewer - do you understand the purpose of the ePortfolio (i.e. is there a clear connection between artifacts and contextual information)? 
3. As a viewer - is there a clear "voice" and/or digital identity? What are some ways this is expressed throughout the ePortfolio? 
4. As an ePortfolio creator - what are some resources and/or strategies you've found most helpful? 

These questions can also be used for instructors to provide feedback on student's ePortfolio to go beyond a checklist to more formative feedback. 

REFLECTION: 

Reflection is an essential aspect of a learning ePortfolio and the learning process in general. ePortfolios are an excellent way to facilitate reflection as students are contextualizing artifacts, explaining their personal, professional, and/or community goals, and highlighting their learning process. We recommend students reflect throughout a course and include these reflections in their ePortfolios. Here are some useful reflection questions for ePortfolio learning based on Gibbs' Reflective Cycle: 

1. Description: What materials are included? What experience, class, or project are you highlighting?

2. Feelings: What were you feeling while creating these? Were any fun, particularly challenging, etc.?

3. Evaluation: What did you do well and what did you struggle with? Which of your materials illustrate your best work and your learning work?

4. Analysis: Why does this matter? What does this illustrate about my growth or learning? 

5. Conclusion: Why should the audience care? What is the main takeaway? 

6. Action Plan: What will I do in the future? How do these materials represent my goals or transfer? 

SELF-ASSESSMENT

ePortfolios provide a useful space for students to self-assess their learning. Although we typically see self-assessment as something that happens at the end of a course, ePortfolios provide students a space to look at artifacts from a unit or portion of the class and reflect on their current process. By making arguments for how they are meeting the outcomes and/or objectives of a course students are able to more easily articulate what they are supposed to be getting out of the course and how it relates to their own meaning-making. Some guiding questions for self-assessment include: 

1. Did I work as hard as I could have? 
2. Did I set and maintain high standards for myself? 
3. Did I spend enough time to do quality work? 
4. Did I regulate my distractions and procrastination in order to do my work? 
5. Did I make good use of available resources? 
6. Did I ask questions if I needed help? 
7. Did I review my work for possible errors? 
8. Did I examine best practices/examples of similar work? 

Teaching ePortfolios: What's Next: Transfer of Learning 

As students complete their ePortfolios, there are two major steps communicating and showcasing the learning and answer the question "What's Next?" Some strategies for helping students communicate their learning include: 

1. Classroom Showcases - these can help students illustrate to one another their learning throughout a course. It can be especially helpful to pair up with another course also using ePortfolios to showcase learning across campus and different disciplines
2. Linking it to other places - students creating career ePortfolios can combine their learning with other platforms such as LinkedIn or Handshake to help potential employers know more about what they value
3. Supporting the ePortfolio Gallery - for our own ePortfolio website we encourage students to submit their ePortfolios so we can continue to grow and learn from one another. 

"What's Next?" Transfer of Learning

ePortfolios should not stop at the end of a course, program, curriculum, etc. Although students might not use the same ePortfolio, it is useful to think about transferrable skills as students move forward. Some guiding questions for students include:

1. What aspects of learning can I transfer from this ePortfolio to another (for example from learning to career)?
2. What can I teach my peers about ePortfolios now that I've completed one? 
3. What has creating an ePortfolio allowed me to do (i.e. biography, identify goals, experiment with multimodal writing, etc.)

Having students keep these questions in mind can help them as they move from one ePortfolio to another.