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AAEEBL Digital Ethics Principles v.2: version 2

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Decolonization (DEIBD)

Educators are aware of equity-related challenges and address learning needs related to each student’s identity, culture, and background as they create ePortfolios.

Abstract: The creation of ePortfolios happens within a multitude of contexts: The country you live in, your institution, the dominant academic culture, the platform provider’s approach or philosophy, the personal beliefs of each educator, and also the intersection of identities, cultures, and backgrounds of the individual learners. Students, educators, administrators, and ePortfolio platform providers must

gain awareness of equity-related challenges, e.g., assumptions, biases, social and institutional barriers, that students face when building and sharing ePortfolios;
take action by constructing equity-minded ePortfolio assignments; and
review the ePortfolio experience with students regularly to ask about any equity-related issues that may impact their motivation, opportunities, and achievement.

To create an environment where learners feel welcome and encouraged to participate fully in ePortfolio activities that often involve revealing who they are, every stakeholder must consider how to foster each person’s sense of belonging in a class, at an educational institution, and in a field or discipline. The process involves honoring and making visible the diversity of the educational community by designing ePortfolio instruction that is equitable for diverse learners and scaffolding that learning process. It also respects the intersection of each learner’s identity, culture, and background by paying attention to how those different backgrounds and experiences can be communicated and interpreted within an ePortfolio.

Creating an ePortfolio can involve different levels of risk for marginalized and multiply marginalized ePortfolio creators. Such risks, starting with the instructor and continuing with additional audiences, may include bias, assumptions regarding digital access, and expectations regarding sharing personal information.

Strategies for applying this principle include…

Strategies for increasing diversity
Finding out more about learners, including their identity, culture, and background and creating ePortfolio assignments based on an asset model.
Creating ePortfolio assignments that include resources representing different perspectives about underlying course topics and that are based on an asset model.
Citing a diverse set of perspectives to support the arguments you make as a learner through your ePortfolio artifacts and reflections, respecting conventions and institutional guidelines in regard to artifact sharing.
Strategies for increasing equity
Facilitating a class discussion with your entire class about how to balance 1) presenting one’s identity, culture, and background throughout an ePortfolio, and 2) addressing viewers’ potential biases.
Providing support and resources for students, educators, and staff, e.g., the Peralta Equity Rubric, that help them to address equity concepts in ePortfolio-related activities.
Encouraging students to ask for what they need to have a better learning experience with portfolios, including support for creating mobile-friendly and low-bandwidth artifacts, captioning multimedia resources, and understanding their importance.
Strategies for increasing inclusion
Asking portfolio questions that encourage students to reference their own cultural and social backgrounds and show them that these are welcomed while providing space for students to self-select the extent to which they share their personal lives.
Considering ePortfolio artifacts and reflections for how the use of language may be interpreted by diverse readers from other backgrounds and cultures.
Teaching students how to design accessible ePortfolios by including alternate formats of their ePortfolio artifacts as reviewers, classmates, community members, or employers may use assistive technologies.
Strategies for increasing belonging
Creating a positive environment built on trust, and forming relationships with students. This includes taking their personal stories into consideration when formulating portfolio questions, giving feedback, and assessing portfolios to encourage sharing without judgment.
Accepting that there are many ways of gaining knowledge and understanding and being open to explore these with students. That may also involve revising activities to incorporate these different ways for students to feel heard, accepted, and safe.
Giving students some choice of expression in their portfolios, educators signal to the students that their ways of learning and expression are valued. It is up to the students to settle on the approach that suits them best (see also Universal Design for Learning).
Strategies for decolonization
Including members from the learners’ community, e.g. elders from an Indigenous community, in the design of portfolio activities to ensure they are culturally appropriate, allow learners to draw from their own knowledge traditions, and align with the community’s practices. Seek their advice on the best approach of working with the community, sharing results appropriately, and creating an environment beneficial to everyone.
Balancing knowledge traditions requires gaining awareness of how different cultures, including but not limited to Indigenous Peoples, share and gain knowledge (process) as well as how they view the world (context).
Respecting and adhering to cultural norms and concepts from Indigenous and other cultures that may differ vastly from the dominant culture.

Scenarios

Note: Each scenario is associated with one of the concepts primarily. However, often other concepts play into it as well.

Scenario #1 (Diversity)

You are an administrator and tasked to collect portfolios to include in a public showcase of the work done by students and educators in your program. You do not have access to all portfolios created because many of them are confidential and only shared with educators for assessment purposes.

You create a poster that you can attach to emails to educators and also students for them to get in touch with you if they want to share their portfolio or know of someone whom you could ask. You send the poster to programs on campus, including student organizations and programs that support marginalized student populations, like the Advocates for Disabilities organization, the Black Student Union, the Association for Indonesian Students, etc.

You catch up with each student and educator who proposed a portfolio and make sure that they are fully aware of the conditions of sharing, where their portfolios will appear and for how long. You check that the content follows your institution’s copyright and acceptable use policies. If re-use permissions are restricted, you may ask the portfolio creator to provide you with a revision that adheres more to the guidelines set for the showcase.

When you select portfolios for the final showcase, you make sure to have a range of different portfolios, topics, and perspectives that represent the diversity that you have in your program.

Scenario #2 (Equity)

You are an ePortfolio platform provider and want to increase learning equity for students creating their ePortfolio experiences. You and your team must address a variety of equity-related challenges. First, to support students who do not have reliable access to devices and/or the Internet, you work to make the interface more mobile-friendly, to create simple pathways for media to be converted to formats that require less bandwidth, and to provide automated prompts for students to consider using multiple formats to showcase their knowledge and skills.

Next, to support ePortfolio creators who are not represented in the images and media on your organization’s website and marketing collateral, you create a design campaign that more accurately reflects the diversity of higher education students. Further, the images and media show that a diverse set of students uses your ePortfolio platform to share work in a range of disciplines, especially science, technology, engineering, and math.

Last, to prevent the use of learner analytics from perpetuating inequities, you engage the entire team in activities that ask a diverse group of professionals to review how you construct algorithms and how you train educators and administrators to interpret the data.

Scenario #3 (Inclusion)

You are an educator and are aware of the importance of making your students feel welcome in their learning environment to engage them fully. You understand that building trust and forming personal relationships with your students is a crucial part in this, especially because you ask your students to create a learning portfolio in which they will share personal thoughts, opinions, and stories. By knowing your students better on a personal level, you can engage them in a respectful, equitable, and inclusive way that takes their personal stories into consideration.

You begin the process by working with students to construct community norms that foster a safe environment where educators and students alike hold themselves accountable, treat each other with respect, and allow everyone to share as much as they are willing to. Some students may seem like an open book and talk about their entire life’s history while others are more selective. As a class you agree to accept the entire range of participation, as it is up to each person to decide what and how they want to share.

You also discuss the concept of creating a ‘brave space’ to intentionally build diversity and social justice and incorporate some example brave space agreement guidelines such as

listen to understand, not to respond;
address the idea, not the person;
explore, recognize, and acknowledge your privilege; and
make space by sharing speaking time.

As a part of this discussion, ask students to consider the differences between an inclusive learning space and the public digital world.

Scenario #4 (Belonging)

You are a student and are tasked to create an employability portfolio showcasing your skills and competencies. As you are applying for a graduate role, you know the audience of your portfolio. Your educator suggests you find out about cultural practices of the company, the social environment in which it operates, and its diversity and inclusion practices to tailor your portfolio appropriately. This also helps you dig deeper into the company itself and get to know its vision and values.

Your educator encourages you to include a reflection about how your values align with working in the company’s professional field. You decide to include statements that show appreciation for employer actions that foster belonging among the workers, such as being recognized for positive contributions to an organization, being able to express opinions respectfully and freely, and receiving feedback that supports personal growth. You show your draft portfolio to someone in the company if you already have a contact there or someone in the same industry to receive feedback. If needed, you review your portfolio and make it even more specific.

Scenario #5 (Decolonization)

You are an educator in a class in which ePortfolios are introduced for the first time. Traditionally, this class is taken by a wide range of students, including many Indigenous learners from the community. You want to ensure that you are culturally appropriate in your activities and also tie your activities to the wider study program. To avoid asking one of your Indigenous colleagues to speak for an entire group or to perform unpaid work, you contact the Cultural Advisor at your institution. You ask to meet with them to discuss your ePortfolio project.

Together you review the learning outcomes of your course and discuss how you can create a positive environment for all students and ask reflective questions that encourage your students to share their learning and thinking in the best ways for them. Since the Cultural Advisor has a unique perspective due to their personal Indigenous identity, they suggest you start conversations with other community members to learn from them and to get to know the broad variety of Indigenous voices. There is no single Indigenous identity, and one person cannot speak for them all. This will give you a good foundation to see your students’ identities and how you can best support them.

You realize that incorporating Indigenous ways of learning, communicating and collaborating will also benefit all other students for they create an environment of inquiry, sharing, supporting each other, learning together and learning from each other. You further determine that the portfolio is a great vehicle for giving students that freedom of self-expression and inviting them to choose their own ways of representing themselves.

You may introduce your students to use Traditional Knowledge Labels to identify specific knowledge and resources to express how these can be shared and used in research.

Scenario #6 (Multiple)

You are an educator and teach a course that includes the creation of a semester-long learning portfolio as well as assessment portfolios. Before the start of the semester, you review your inclusive teaching statement and adjust it if needed. You include the statement in your syllabus and lead a discussion in the first class session with your students to ensure that they understand what that means for their learning, how they approach their class activities, and what they can expect of you and each other. Together, you establish group agreements that everyone agrees to, including a plan on how to deal with offenses.

Throughout the semester, you reflect on your practice and how you support students in their personal learning journeys that they express and share in their portfolios and make adjustments to your interactions and how you give feedback as needed. You also review your scaffolding of portfolio work as the semester progresses as you may see that students require less guidance the more experience they have creating their own portfolios and engaging with other students’ portfolios.

In a department meeting, you discuss your experiences in your course with other educators to share how the portfolio has helped your students form meaningful relationships with each other and with you and how that can influence their further studies with other educators. You help each other find common elements in each course that you can use to link the individual courses and show students how they can progress from one to another and keep up with their portfolio work. Your learning designer, who works across all courses in your department, supports you to create that cohesion.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank everyone who has supported the research and our learning on this topic, especially those we interviewed: Prof. Dr. Marie Battiste (University of Saskatchewan in Canada), Chris Cormack (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe; Catalyst IT in Aotearoa New Zealand), Dr. Frankie Egan (Monash University in Australia), Hinerangi Eruera Murphy (Ngāti Awa; Te Whare Wānanga ō Awanuiārangi in Aotearoa New Zealand), Chelsea Finnie (Catalyst IT in Aotearoa New Zealand), Prof. Dr. JaneMaree Maher (Monash University in Australia), Dr. Emily van der Nagel (Monash University in Australia), Prof. Dr. Chavella Pittman (Effective Faculty in the U.S.A.), Prof. Dr. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou; University of Waikato - Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand), Dr. Zala Volcic (Monash University in Australia).

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Evaluating ePortfolios 18 ePortfolio evaluation should consider process, inclusion, reflective practice, and alignment with the stated objectives of the context in which the ePortfolio was created. plain 1092063 2022-01-30T23:53:27-08:00
ePortfolio evaluation should consider process, inclusion, reflective practice, and alignment with the stated objectives of the context in which the ePortfolio was created.

ABSTRACT: Educators and students benefit from a shared understanding of what content in the ePortfolio will be evaluated as well as the criteria for evaluation. Evaluation mechanisms should be developed in accordance with best practices of ethical ePortfolio pedagogy, including process, inclusion, and reflection. Educators need to make explicit how evaluation criteria align with assignment or course objectives or should develop criteria in collaboration with students. The evaluation process ideally includes both educators and students.
Strategies for applying this principle include…
- Evaluating ePortfolios through fair, transparent, and inclusive strategies with evaluation measures and procedures that are explicitly communicated to students prior to the assignment. [DEIBD]
- Developing evaluation mechanisms that are informed by research, aligned to learning outcomes, and include input from multiple and diverse stakeholders, including administrators, faculty, and students.
- Creating evaluation criteria that align with disciplinary or professional standards and are meaningful to students beyond the context of a single course.
- Evaluating ePortfolios through summative approaches to evaluation beyond traditional rubrics/grades, such as labor-based criteria and process documents, to offer more equitable approaches to feedback and grading.
- Integrating formative reflection strategies throughout to provide opportunities for students to self-assess and receive on-going feedback.
- Providing educators with access to resources and models that support the design of effective ePortfolio evaluation methods.
- Offering faculty adequate training to apply evaluation materials to ePortfolios with a knowledge of how bias operates in the rating/evaluation/feedback processes. [Support][DEIBD]
- Compensating and recognizing individuals who continually ensure ePortfolio evaluation is performed ethically, including but not limited to training and professional development, norming sessions, feedback and listening sessions, etc. [Visibility of Labor]
Scenarios:
Scenario #1:
You are a program administrator leading a new ePortfolio initiative at your college. You’ve been asked to develop flexible ePortfolio resources that can be used by faculty across the disciplines, including an ePortfolio rubric. You have a committee composed of educators from different colleges to help you begin this work. As you come together to discuss what you value in ePortfolios, you discover that ideas like professionalism, effective communication, and visual literacy vary significantly from one discipline to the next. A rubric that is too specific might constrain ePortfolio creators or unfairly evaluate them. While you want to create shared materials that can be helpful for students and instructors, you also want evaluation criteria to align to professional and disciplinary expectations.

To balance these tensions, you choose five general areas (visual literacy, written literacy, technical literacy, professional literacy, and ethical literacy) but then encourage educators to work with students to describe what these areas look like in their disciplinary and professional communities and the best way to evaluate their ePortfolios within the context of the course or program. You create in-class activities that educators can use in their courses to collaborate with students on creating these evaluation materials.
Scenario #2:
You are a student who is working on an ePortfolio as part of their capstone course in Health and Human Sciences. You have been using the assignment sheet to begin the ePortfolio drafting process but are feeling nervous about whether or not you are on the “right” track and will earn a good grade. Luckily, your educator has planned a peer review, and you are hopeful that this will be an opportunity to get feedback from peers. You are quite nervous though, because the last time you participated in a peer review activity, the educator shared a rubric with you and told everyone to read it and look over their peer’s writing. That was confusing because the rubric had a lot of “teacherly” words, and you weren’t sure how exactly to apply a rubric to writing. When you got your paper back, your peer had only moved some commas around.

The educator in your capstone course takes a different approach to peer review. They begin by explaining the purpose for peer review and what they hope you gain from the activity. Then, they explain how the peer review directions have been aligned to the ePortfolio assignment and include criteria that are meaningful to professionals in your disciplinary community along with two blank criteria, which the class will get to determine. Next, you all practice using the peer review directions on an example ePortfolio with space for questions and concerns. After, you apply the criteria to two ePortfolios from your course. The criteria guide you in giving your peers feedback on particular parts of their ePortfolios. As you have questions, you add them to the class’ shared question document, which is reviewed regularly. Finally, you do some reflective writing where you review the feedback you received and begin planning for revisions as needed.
Scenario #3:
You are an educator who uses ePortfolios in their own teaching, ensuring students receive both formative and summative feedback. However, a scholar in your field issues a challenge to consider the racial histories that inform and are embedded in common instructional practices, such as evaluation and feedback. To respond to this call to action, you reconsider the mechanisms for providing feedback and evaluating ePortfolios within your course. How might your materials and processes (such as guiding questions, peer review, rubrics, etc.) embed assumptions and values, increase inequity, and marginalize some learners? Using the scholarship of your field, you revise your evaluation practices to include students as active participants by inviting them to design individualized evaluation practices that address their personal, disciplinary, and/or professional goals.
Resources:
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  3. Kelly-Riley, D. (2012). Getting off the boat and onto the bank: Exploring the validity of shared evaluation methods for students of color in college writing assessment. In A. B. Inoue & M. Poe (Eds.), Race and Writing Assessment (pp. 29-43). Peter Lang Publishing.
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Visibility of Labor 11 The labor required by students, educators, and administrators to create, develop, implement, support, and evaluate ePortfolios should be visible, sustainable, compensated where appropriate, and counted toward evaluation and advancement. plain 2022-01-30T23:59:58-08:00
The labor required by students, educators, and administrators to create, develop, implement, support, and evaluate ePortfolios should be visible, sustainable, compensated where appropriate, and counted toward evaluation and advancement.

ABSTRACT: Learning is invisible labor. Constant shifts in technologies, strategies, rhetorical knowledge, technical skills, genres, and professional expectations require ongoing efforts by all stakeholders. The ability to develop, implement, create, support, and assess ePortfolios requires faculty and staff to have multi-disciplinary expertise that should be recognized and rewarded by the institutions in which ePortfolio work takes place. In addition, the intellectual and affective labor and personal risk required of students to learn and employ new platforms, genres, and compositional practices when designing and creating ePortfolios should be recognized and rewarded.
Strategies for applying this principle include...
- Making visible the value of iterative, long-term ePortfolio developmental processes as students bridge from academic to career environments, such as
  earning credit for an individual course
  demonstrating progress toward completion of institutional requirements (e.g., General Education)
  earning a credential, badge, certificate, or degree from a program or institution; or
  demonstrating digital literacy skills to future employers.
- Acknowledging the cognitive load, emotional labor, and personal risk that accompanies ePortfolio pedagogy and creation by supporting this work with dedicated physical space, public recognition, and professional development.
- Addressing the disproportionate impact of cognitive load, emotional labor, and personal risk on students belonging to minoritized and underrepresented populations and responding to that by considering access, intentional modeling, and other forms of additional support.
- Recognizing, rewarding, and, where appropriate, compensating students who support ePortfolio creation through group projects and peer-to-peer learning, including tutoring, mentoring, and creating ePortfolio resources.
- Recognizing ePortfolio practitioners as subject matter experts in scholarly research by creating visibility tied to advancement so that ePortfolio administration, research, and service may support promotion and/or tenure, especially if a program’s assessment relies on ePortfolios.
- Identifying ePortfolio studies and administration as a scholarly and professional field that professional organizations, institutions, and departments prepare new practitioners to engage with.
- Conducting institutional analysis to better understand who engages in ePortfolio-related work on campus, what training and support are offered to those individuals, and how they are recognized for their efforts.
- Increasing awareness of time and effort for designing and integrating ePortfolio implementation, evaluation, and assessment.
- Creating sustainable support for those designing and maintaining ePortfolio initiatives, which must constantly adapt to institutional histories, shifting contexts, professional expectations, new technologies, and changing regulations.
- Addressing varying levels of pedagogical agency across faculty of different ranks, while increasing buy-in and maintaining consistency and coherency across a student’s experience as an ePortfolio creator.
Scenarios
Scenario #1:
You are a student required to complete an ePortfolio in your capstone course. The process of curating, reflecting, and displaying your work for a professional audience is new and takes significant time and energy. To make the value of this experience more visible, your professor suggests that you include a description of the process on your resume and in other job materials. Additionally, your university provides a certificate of completion that outlines the skills demonstrated in your ePortfolio, such as critical thinking, written communication, digital literacy, and more. Now that you have the resources to display the value of ePortfolio creation, you can tangibly connect the capstone assignment to your professional goals and relay that connection to your audience.
Scenario #2:
You are a High Impact Practices (HIPs) coordinator working with colleagues across your institution to develop an ePortfolio initiative as part of your institution’s commitment to HIPs. You are working to build a coalition with directors of the Writing Program, the Undergraduate Research, Career Services & Internships, and the Community Engagement Center. Your office is responsible for helping faculty identify appropriate ePortfolio systems, providing ongoing training for ePortfolio implementation, and running a center that supports students who are creating ePortfolios. The upper administration are exploring how to most effectively show their commitment to this process. You recommend that they start by providing a week-long paid training, a year-long series of scheduled meetings to bring stakeholders on board, and stipends for faculty who implement ePortfolios. In addition, you suggest that they incentivize ePortfolio research as part of the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Scenario #3:
You are an educator required to incorporate an ePortfolio element into your course design. To do so, you take part in professional development offered by the university, which provides time and space for you to become familiar with the critical underpinning of ePortfolio pedagogy, the technology involved, and related instructional design components (such as assignment design, support, and evaluation). Your institution recognizes this additional effort by providing a certificate of completion, which your department considers in connection to promotion and other incentives. Furthermore, as you become more confident and proficient in your ePortfolio efforts, your department asks you to mentor educators new to the experience. Recognizing the time and emotional labor this might entail, you request that the department compensate you through mechanisms such as stipends or course releases.

Resources:
1. 1. Conceição, S. C. O., & Lehman, R. M. (2011). Managing online instructor workload: Strategies for finding balance and success. Jossey-Bass.
  2. Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Committee on Computers and Composition. (2015). CCCC promotion and tenure guidelines for work with technology. https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/promotionandtenure
  3. D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. (2020). 7. Show Your Work. In Data Feminism (pp. 173–202). MIT Press. https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/0vgzaln4/release/3
  4. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin.
  5. Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551–575. https://doi.org/10.1086/227049
  6. Rodrigo, R., & Romberger, J. (2017). Managing digital technologies in writing programs: Writing program technologists & invisible service. Computers and Composition, 44, 67–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2017.03.003
  7. Watson, C. E., Kuh, G. D., Rhodes, T. L., Penny Light, T., & Chen, H. L. (2016). Editorial: EPortfolios – The eleventh High Impact Practice. International Journal of EPortfolio, 6(2), 65–69.
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Promote Awareness 10 Institutional administrators, staff, and educators are responsible for promoting awareness of digital ethics in ePortfolio making. plain 1006877 2022-01-30T23:47:12-08:00
Institutional administrators, staff, and educators are responsible for promoting awareness of digital ethics in ePortfolio making.

ABSTRACT: ePortfolio educators, administrators, and staff should have a working knowledge of the ethical issues related to ePortfolios, including data collection, security, and management; ethical sharing and representation; digital bias; accessibility; ePortfolio security and privacy; copyright, fair use, and open access; and intended vs. potential audiences.
Strategies for applying this principle include…
- Asking institutional stakeholders about use and storage of ePortfolio-related data, student rights to ePortfolio ownership, rationale for platform selection, and accessibility standards before assigning ePortfolios to students.
- Developing and sharing strategies for identifying, engaging with, and countering potential biases among learners, educator(s), and any others who might review an ePortfolio. [DEIBD]
- Ensuring that students can determine who shall have access to their various portfolios on the platform they were asked to use.
- Teaching students about privacy settings and their implications.
- Providing students with examples that help them define and determine the distinctions between their personal and professional online identities.
- Helping students anticipate how diverse audiences will react differently to the information they share (writing, images, coursework, etc.).
- Informing students of what entities or audiences may have access to their identity representations, data, and intellectual property along with any possible benefits and harm that may result from this access.
- Sharing photo and media galleries that foster equal and adequate representation of the diverse set of students creating portfolios at your institution.
- Teaching students basic knowledge about copyright, fair use, and open access.
Scenarios:
Scenario #1:
You are a student. You have been asked by your educator to create a showcase portfolio of your most recent achievements, from activities and experiences in and beyond the course. The audience for your portfolio is humanitarian and volunteer organizations which provide summer abroad opportunities overseas.

You wonder what artifacts would be the best examples to use and decide to showcase your most recent retail work experience and holiday on the coast. You include photos with your friends at the beach and posts from Facebook about events at work. When you submit your first draft, your educator’s feedback is that you need to think more about your purpose and how that purpose connects to what the particular audience would see as appropriate professional images, evidence, and experiences.

Your educator shares with the class a number of tips for choosing artifacts. First, you should consider diverse potential audiences as you choose artifacts. Second, you need to consider how you will separate your personal and professional identities online. Further, you should think about how what you share online might be perceived by others, both those you know and those you do not know, and the potential future consequences for yourself and others.
Scenario #2:
You are an educator. Students create a public ePortfolio in your capstone course that they could use when they enter the job market. You work to provide students with example portfolios that represent a diverse group of students and experiences.

One student voices concern that she may encounter bias on the job market if her image is included in the ePortfolio. Although you want to encourage this student to represent her identity fully, you acknowledge potential bias and engage in a conversation about her options.

You provide her with a sample portfolio of another student who also had this worry. He created an ePortfolio without pictures of himself while still maintaining visual representation of his work. You also share with her another example of a student from a similar background as her own that provides an honest narrative about the intersection of her career and her identity. After the conversation, the student decides to use the example of the ePortfolio without personal photos as a model for her ePortfolio. You direct her to other examples of ePortfolios that have powerful design without relying on personal photos as well as websites where she can access Creative Commons licensed images.
Scenario #3:
You are an educator and administrator or staff member. You oversee the internship program for your department. As part of their internships, students are asked to prepare a final ePortfolio that documents their internship experience and reflects on what they learned. These ePortfolios are evaluated by a committee as part of the students' grades for their internship.

Although you know that this practice is important for reinforcing the learning that happens during the internship experience, you have noticed that students struggle to explore the full breadth of their experience without disclosing details that are inappropriate for public consumption.
In order to protect students and the people they encounter in the course of their internships, you work with your department chair and technology consultants to ensure that their ePortfolios are only accessible to you and the individual student. Then, in consultation with the students, you revise the assignment so that they can use the ePortfolio as their private collection and reflection space over the course of their internship and write a public-facing reflection to be reviewed by the assessment committee rather than the full, personal portfolio.
Scenario #4:
You are a program administrator and/or staff member. You are designing an ePortfolio workshop to deliver in collaboration with your Career Center. The topic for this workshop is “Professionalism and ePortfolios.” You want to focus on the thinking work ePortfolio creators should do before they begin building their ePortfolio.

Part of this workshop helps students develop a professional identity in response to their imagined audience and purpose. However, you also ask students to consider professionalism in the context of the ePortfolio: What does it mean to be a professional in this digital space?
Students might speak to how they select photos and artifacts to feature in the ePortfolio, how they talk about their experiences in ways that connect to terms used in their profession, or how they show knowledge of professional standards by attributing and re-using sources according to their professional community’s standards for re-use.

As students reflect on how they might signal professionalism in ePortfolio creation, you also speak to the consequences an unprofessional ePortfolio can have for them. You show students how they can protect their ePortfolio content until they are ready to publish their site, and you give them resources for feedback from institutional partners on campus (the career center, the writing center, and/or their advisors).
Resources:
1. 1. Brown Wilson, C., Slade, C., Kirby, M. M., Downer, T., Fisher, M. B., & Nuessler, S. (2018). Digital ethics and the use of ePortfolio: A scoping review of the literature. International Journal of EPortfolio, 8(2), 115–125.
  2. Charlesworth, A., & Grant, A. (n.d.). 10 ePortfolios and the law: What you and your organisation should know. University of Bristol.
  3. Gallagher, C. W., & Poklop, L. L. (2014). ePortfolios and audience: Teaching a critical twenty-first century skill. International Journal of EPortfolio, 4(1), 7–20.
  4. Gallagher, K., Magid, L., & Pruitt, K. (2019). The educator’s guide to student data privacy. ConnectSafely.
  5. Hargittai, E., & Marwick, A. (2016). “What can I really do?” Explaining the privacy paradox with online apathy. International Journal of Communication, 10, 3737–3757.
  6. Henning, M. A., Hawken, S., MacDonald, J., McKimm, J., Brown, M., Moriarty, H., Gasquoine, S., Chan, K., Hilder, J., & Wilkinson, T. (2017). Exploring educational interventions to facilitate health professional students’ professionally safe online presence. Medical Teacher, 39(9), 959–966. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159X.2017.1332363
  7. Lorenzo, G., & Ittelson, J. (2005). An overview of institutional e-portfolios. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, 2.
  8. Mann, K. (2013, June 20). Online assignments and student privacy. Academic Technology.
  9. Matthews-DeNatale, G., Blevins-Bohanan, S. J., Rothwell, C. G., & Wehlburg, C. M. (2017). Redesigning learning: Eportfolios in support of reflective growth within individuals and organizations. In T. Batson, T. L. Rhodes, C. E. Watson, H. L. Chen, K. S. Coleman, & A. Harver (Eds.), Field guide to eportfolio. (pp. 14–24). Association of American Colleges and Universities.
  10. Nagler, A., Andolsek, K., & Padmore, J. S. (2009). The unintended consequences of portfolios in graduate medical education. Academic Medicine, 84(11), 1522–1526. https://doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0b013e3181bb2636
  11. Privacy Technical Assistance Center. (2014). Protecting student privacy while using online educational services. U.S. Department of Education. \
  12. Ribble, M., & Park, M. (2019). The digital citizenship handbook for school leaders: Fostering positive interactions online. International Society for Technology in Education.
  13. Slade, C., Wilson, C. B., Kirby, M., Downer, T., Fisher, M., & Isbel, S. (2018). A new concern: Ethical decision making in students’ secondary use of data from their ePortfolios. 2018 EPortfolio Forum EBook of Short Papers, 71–75.
  14. Stewart, S. M. (2013). Making practice transparent through e-portfolio. Women and Birth, 26(4), e117–e121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wombi.2013.02.005
  15. University of Canberra. (2019, August 30). How to use Mahara ePortfolio. https://portfolio.canberra.edu.au/view/view.php?id=21008
  16. University of Oregon. (2011). Consent for disclosure of education record: EPortfolio participation. University of Oregon, Office of the Registrar.
  17. University of Ottawa. (n.d.). EPortfolio coach and student confidentiality agreement.
You can view these and other references connected to this topic in our library, and export them to your own reference manager.

This document was created by the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force.

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Accessibility 7 All ePortfolio platforms and pedagogy should be thoroughly vetted for accessibility according to the standards identified by one’s culture, government, or profession. plain 1006879 2022-01-30T23:56:25-08:00
All ePortfolio platforms and pedagogy should be thoroughly vetted for accessibility according to the standards identified by one’s culture, government, or profession.

ABSTRACT: ePortfolio platforms should be accessible to diverse creators as well as diverse audiences. Stakeholders should test platforms for accessibility, and educators and students should be educated about accessible content creation.
Strategies for applying this principle include...
- Recognizing that technologies are not always designed with all students in mind, and accessible platforms benefit all users.
- Recognizing that it isn’t enough to rely upon a particular software company’s assertions regarding accessibility. Decision-makers and other stakeholders should test accessibility prior to purchase or deployment of any ePortfolio platform. This can be done in cooperation with institutional partners, e.g. the Office of Inclusion and Disability (or similar) and affected students and staff.
- Including training so that educators, administrators, and staff understand accessibility standards when selecting ePortfolio tools and creating content.
- Preparing students to practice accessible design for diverse ePortfolio viewers.
- Meeting legal and ethical accessibility standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CPRD), and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), among others, depending on your local context.
Scenarios:
Scenario #1:
You are a student participating in an internship as part of your work-integrated learning requirement in your Hospitality Management program. Your position as sous-chef in your favorite restaurant in town gives you rich learning opportunities, and you want to document these experiences not just in text but also in multimedia content. Your internship mentor is okay with you taking photos and video of the kitchen and your work to share in your portfolio.

During one of the introductory sessions to the ePortfolio work for your internship, you learned about creating accessible content so that people with differing abilities can read your portfolio and comment on it. Therefore, when you upload photos of the dishes you created, you provide appropriate alternative text descriptions that screen readers can access. When you use video to take viewers through the process of creating a dish or reflecting on a task, you make a transcript or summary available as text that you place next to the video. While this adds work to your portfolio creation process, it also helps you think about your audience, how your portfolio is viewed, and how you can express your ideas and reflections in an effective and concise manner.
Scenario #2:
You are an educator. Your institution is finalizing its ePortfolio choices. As a member of the selection committee, you are tasked with verifying that each platform is compliant with the accessibility standards adopted by your institution. In this role, you collaborate with any units that work with students with disabilities to involve them in testing, asking them to provide a representative for the team that makes decisions.

As part of the vetting process, you also ask the vendor for a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) that shows which accessibility accommodations they have created and which are on the roadmap. Furthermore, the committee hires student assistants working in a Disability Programs and Resource Center to take part in the testing process.

This way, the committee strategically and intentionally assesses each platform in regards to accessibility.
Scenario #3:
You are a program administrator and/or staff member. Your department has just started an undergraduate ePortfolio requirement. You have vetted potential platforms to ensure they fit your ePortfolio program’s purpose and are accessible to students across devices (including assistive technologies). You are now ready to introduce the requirement to educators and start adapting the curriculum.

As you plan the professional development sessions that will roll-out this new requirement, you are careful to make space to share technical knowledge. You ensure that educators get to know the platform and how the platform can adjust for students with disabilities or different device preferences. You also talk to educators about accessible ePortfolio design. You include topics from the Web Accessibility Initiative WCAG2.1 resource, such as alternative text, meaningful sequence of content, and accessible design principles (non-text contrast, spacing, etc.). You have educators practice viewing example ePortfolios on multiple devices and with a screen reader. You then provide educators with local and online resources. You plan to review platform accessibility in your ePortfolio professional development workshop each year.
Resources:
1. 1. Giorgini, F. (2010). An interoperable ePortfolio tool for all. In M. Wolpers, P. A. Kirschner, M. Scheffel, S. Lindstaedt, & V. Dimitrova (Eds.), Sustaining TEL: From innovation to learning and practice (pp. 500–505). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16020-2_44
  2. Lee, H., & Templeton, R. (2008). Ensuring equal access to technology: Providing assistive technology for students with disabilities. Theory Into Practice, 47(3), 212–219.
  3. Oswal, S. K. (2013). Accessible ePortfolios for visually-impaired users: Interfaces, designs, and infrastructures. In K. V. Wills & R. Rice (Eds.), ePortfolio performance support Systems: Constructing, presenting, and assessing portfolios (pp. 135–153). WAC Clearinghouse.
  4. Seymour ∗, W., & Lupton, D. (2004). Holding the line online: Exploring wired relationships for people with disabilities. Disability & Society, 19(4), 291–305. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687590410001689421
  5. W3C. (n.d.). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.
You can view these and other references connected to this topic in our library, and export them to your own reference manager.

This document was created by the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force.

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Respect Author Rights and Re-use Permissions 5 ePortfolio creators should understand and respect author rights, best practices for re-use, and representation. plain 1006880 2022-01-30T23:44:41-08:00
ePortfolio creators should understand and respect author rights, best practices for re-use, and representation.

ABSTRACT: Because ePortfolios ask creators to re-use text and media, they need a working knowledge of plagiarism, copyright, fair use, and licensing. Students should be ethical owners of their ePortfolios and engage in conversations about how to responsibly move artifacts into ePortfolios, particularly when artifacts represent professional or collaborative experiences or involve the representation of others.
Strategies for applying this principle include…
- Advocating for student ownership of ePortfolios and ePortfolio portability post-graduation.
- Ensuring ePortfolio creators are aware of how the ePortfolio will be used by an institution or employer (e.g., for institutional assessment), and obtaining consent from students for this re-use.
- Distinguishing among concepts related to plagiarism, attribution, citation, copyright, fair use, and licensing.
- Demonstrating how to attribute sources according to disciplinary, professional, institutional, and cultural standards, as well as genre conventions, to avoid accusations of plagiarism.
- Identifying situations in which ePortfolio creators can argue fair use within their institution/culture.
- Becoming familiar with various licensing agreements regarding re-use of resources, and knowing how to apply an appropriate Creative Commons license to an ePortfolio to guide its re-use.
- Being thoughtful in how to represent others’ identities and ideas, including the use of photos, collaborative projects, and work authored and owned by others. This includes sharing artifacts that disclose others’ personal information only when you have the legal right and personal permission to do so.
- Considering how representing others in an ePortfolio can be shaped by social and cultural biases, and being rhetorically thoughtful in selecting and contextualizing artifacts.
- Asking professional organizations about using work completed in internships, employment, and work-for-hire before featuring these artifacts in an ePortfolio in case information is proprietary or protected. When negotiating these professional relationships, you should ask about featuring the work you are doing in your professional ePortfolio.
- Providing specific information for students and educators who work with protected and/or vulnerable groups, such as children, patients, clients, etc., and who may include information about this work in their ePortfolios.
Scenarios:
Scenario #1:
You are a student who is excited to design your ePortfolio. You decide to include artwork from your favorite street artist alongside your bio on the homepage. While the artwork does not have a re-use license at the bottom, you decide to use it anyway. You attribute each piece of art individually at the bottom of the page in APA format with a link to the artist’s website. However, when you show your ePortfolio to your educator, you are accused of breaking copyright law.

You are confused—there’s a full citation at the bottom of the page. While much of your academic career has prepared you to navigate attribution and citation, very little time has been spent on copyright. Your educator asks you to reconsider the homepage design. Specifically, they ask you to reflect on the following questions: is the artwork used in such a way that you can argue fair use? Should you replace this artwork with artwork from the public domain or artwork with clearer re-use licensing? What are the potential risks if you keep the page’s design as-is?

After concluding that this artwork is protected by copyright and you are not using it in a way that suggests fair use, you redesign the page to include an open-access work instead. You still clearly attribute this work to its creator but know that you have permission to re-use it on your personal ePortfolio.
Scenario #2:
You are an undergraduate student in their senior year. You are creating an ePortfolio as you apply for elementary teaching positions. You plan to discuss your student teaching experience in a first grade classroom, specifically a lesson that you co-designed with the supervising educator. When including details about the lesson, you want to be clear about the role that you played while giving credit to the supervising educator. Additionally, you share how you will write about this experience with the educator and get her approval of how you represented her work on the project.

As you start building this page in your ePortfolio, you realize that you would like to include photos of you teaching the lesson. You are worried about including images of young children without guardian permission, but you also know your audience will be engaged by seeing photos of you teaching. Instead of showing students’ faces, you focus on images where the educator is the only identifiable face (e.g., the students are faced toward the front of the room) or blur student faces and include a caption with the photo that explains why you made this ethical consideration.
Scenario #3:
You are an undergraduate in your senior year specializing in early industrial design. You are developing an ePortfolio as part of your senior capstone project. You plan to also use this ePortfolio in the job market. As artifacts, you include your sample designs across a range of project contexts and your theory of industrial design.

While you want your employers to be able to view your work and ability, you also want to make sure they know which material is re-usable and which parts of your portfolio are not. In one of your classes, your educator discussed copyright and the use of Creative Commons licenses, and you understand their benefits. You add an appropriate Creative Commons license to your pages indicating to anyone who views your portfolio what material can be reused. You clearly state that all other parts of your portfolio remain under copyright.
Scenario #4:
You are an educator of an online course. You asked your students to make a public-facing ePortfolio to reflect on and connect their curricular experiences with extra-curricular experiences. One student is struggling with several components. They recently completed an internship, where they helped assess the health of chickens. They want to connect this experience to their pre-vet coursework in hopes that veterinary school application boards will see their passion for animal care. However, without explicit instruction on ePortfolio literacy, they run into several problems: first, when they share a draft of the site with a former supervisor, they are told that they cannot share photos that show the chickens or their care from the company because their methods for chicken care are proprietary. Second, they have included several copyrighted materials, including a journal article that they completed a reading response to and a photo from a veterinary practice’s website.

Ultimately, while they have been asked to complete an ePortfolio, they are lacking the knowledge and support needed to create an ethical and accessible ePortfolio. As their educator, you can help your students avoid these frustrating issues. First, use low stakes activities to research professional standards for sharing and representation in their disciplinary, professional, and national communities. Second, provide them with knowledge of copyright and open access resources to use when selecting decorative images to include.

For additional scenarios on this principle, see Slade et al. (2018).
Resources:
1. 1. Association of College and Research Libraries. (2015). Framework for information literacy for higher education. Association of College and Research Libraries.
  2. Association of Research Libraries, Center for Social Media at American University School of Communication, & Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University Washington College of Law. (2012). Code of best practices in fair use for academic and research libraries. Association of Research Libraries.
  3. Benson, S. R. (Ed.). (2019). Copyright conversations: Rights literacy in a digital world. ALA Editions.
  4. Brewer, M., & ALA Office for Information Technology Policy. (2008). Fair use evaluator.
  5. Center for Media and Social Impact. (2020). Fair use, free speech & intellectual property.
  6. Creative Commons. (n.d.a). About the licenses.
  7. Creative Commons. (n.d.b). Share your work.
  8. Crews, K. D., & Buttler, D. K. (2008). Fair use checklist. Columbia University Libraries.
  9. Hobbs, R. (2010). Copyright clarity: How fair use supports digital learning. Corwin Press. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452219530
  10. James Cook University. (n.d.). EPortfolios & copyright.
  11. Keener, M. (2015). Contextualizing copyright: Fostering students’ understanding of their rights and responsibilities as content creators. Virginia Libraries, 61(1). https://doi.org/10.21061/valib.v61i1.1328
  12. National Council of Teachers of English. (2018, October 25). Code of best practices in fair use for media literacy education.
  13. Poole, P., Brown, M., McNamara, G., O’Hara, J., O’Brien, S., & Burns, D. (2018). Challenges and supports towards the integration of ePortfolios in education. Lessons to be learned from Ireland. Heliyon, 4(11). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2018.e00899
  14. Rife, M. C., Slattery, S., & DeVoss, D. N. (Eds.). (2011). Copy(write): Intellectual property in the writing classroom. WAC Clearinghouse.
  15. Stanford University Libraries. (n.d.). Copyright and fair use.
  16. The University of Queensland. (n.d.). Digital essentials. Library.
  17. The University of Queensland. (2019). ePortfolio for students: Develop a showcase portfolio. The University of Queensland.
  18. Thiede, M. (2018). The basics of copyright and fair use.
  19. Thiede, M., & Zerkee, J. (2019). An active learning approach to teaching copyright essentials. In S. R. Benson (Ed.), Copyright conversations: Rights literacy in a digital world (pp. 141–158). ALA Editions.
  20. World Intellectual Property Organization. (2004). WIPO Intellectual Property Handbook. WIPO.
You can view these and other references connected to this topic in our library, and export them to your own reference manager.

This document was created by the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Strategies for Applying the Evaluating ePortfolios Principle 2 ePortfolio evaluation should consider process, inclusion, reflective practice, and alignment with the stated objectives of the context in which the ePortfolio was created. plain 2021-07-01T11:38:38-07:00
- Evaluating ePortfolios through fair, transparent, and inclusive strategies with evaluation measures and procedures that are explicitly communicated to students prior to the assignment. [DEIBD]
- Developing evaluation mechanisms that are informed by research, aligned to learning outcomes, and include input from multiple and diverse stakeholders, including administrators, faculty, and students.
- Creating evaluation criteria that align with disciplinary or professional standards and are meaningful to students beyond the context of a single course.
- Evaluating ePortfolios through summative approaches to evaluation beyond traditional rubrics/grades, such as labor-based criteria and process documents, to offer more equitable approaches to feedback and grading.
- Integrating formative reflection strategies throughout to provide opportunities for students to self-assess and receive on-going feedback.
- Providing educators with access to resources and models that support the design of effective ePortfolio evaluation methods.
- Offering faculty adequate training to apply evaluation materials to ePortfolios with a knowledge of how bias operates in the rating/evaluation/feedback processes. [Support][DEIBD]
- Compensating and recognizing individuals who continually ensure ePortfolio evaluation is performed ethically, including but not limited to training and professional development, norming sessions, feedback and listening sessions, etc. [Visibility of Labor]