Support
RATIONALE: Institutions must devote resources to supporting ePortfolios, including professional development in ePortfolios. ePortfolio stakeholders are encouraged to partner with offices that have expertise in disability, informational literacy, technology, writing, and teaching and learning to create inclusive ePortfolio requirements with built-in alternatives for individuals with limited access to technology and the internet.
Strategies for applying this principle include…
- Adequately funding and evenly distributing the responsibility for developing, teaching, and assessing ePortfolios throughout the program, department, college, and/or institution.
- Developing and providing training and support on digital ethics, digital citizenship, and effective pedagogical and assessment strategies for educators, staff, and program directors who work with students on ePortfolios.
- Developing clear ePortfolio requirements so that all students can be successful, especially students who have little to no experience with ePortfolio-building technologies.
- Providing alternatives for financially disadvantaged students who cannot afford the costs associated with certain ePortfolio platforms and/or technologies or do not have access to a stable internet connection.
- Creating a set of protocols for data consent, collection, storage, and maintenance and training staff, faculty, and students on these protocols through workshops, handbooks, and other institutional documents.
- Identifying institutional resources and partners for ePortfolio support, such as the office of accessibility, librarians, reading/writing/learning centers, technical support, etc.
Scenarios:
Scenario #1:
You are a student. You are excited to attend your first capstone course meeting for graduating students. On the first day, the educator explains that you will be creating an ePortfolio that will both document your learning from your coursework and showcase your professional experiences to employers and graduate schools in your field.She projects example ePortfolios from previous years and asks the class to analyze them in groups. You are new to ePortfolios and would like to participate in this well-planned first day activity, but you are blind and the educator has not considered how you can view the projected ePortfolios. When you ask about the platform’s ability to interface with screen readers, the educator replies nervously that she has not been asked to consider this before. You feel anxious about your ability to engage with the class and complete this capstone assignment.
When designing ePortfolio assignments, it’s important to consider all students with diverse needs. Institutional experts in disability and accommodations for students with disabilities can help you vet platforms for accessibility, and digital resources can also help you test a site’s ability to interface with assistive technologies, such as a screen reader.
Scenario #2:
You are a student. You are participating in a study abroad program and have been asked to contribute to a collective ePortfolio documenting your experiences in an online course that pairs with the abroad program. You have stretched yourself financially to be able to afford the trip abroad and take time off of work. You have never traveled outside of your home country before, so you are feeling anxious. You have little experience with online learning and ePortfolios.In the pre-trip introduction video to the online course, the educator explains that the class members will all be able to log into the ePortfolio site and contribute photos, blog updates, and reflective writing entries. You know that you will need internet access and a device to do this. You begin to panic. You do not have a laptop, and while you can use the platform on your phone, you have not budgeted for an international data plan.
Your educator assures you that there will be free wifi available for your use where you will be staying. Also, the educator has provided you with details where you can check out a laptop from your institution to take abroad with you.
Scenario #3:
You are a writing program administrator and/or staff member, and your dean has recently asked you to bring ePortfolio assessment into the composition program. You are excited at this possibility, as you have heard about ePortfolios at conferences and in academic journals in your field. However, when you ask about funding for this initiative, your dean says you will have to use your current budget. Your program is staffed mostly by part-time and non-tenure-track professionals who carry high teaching loads and already have limited access to professional development funds.After taking a moment to process the situation, you explain to the dean that an ePortfolio requirement is an exciting, but sizable, commitment. You suggest reaching out to peer institutions that use ePortfolios to understand how much money they spend annually on staff, technology, professional development, assessment, curriculum development, etc. You also reach out to the disability advocates, technology experts, and the librarians on campus to assess the institution’s current resources to support this initiative, as commitment from them in particular would be beneficial. After research and discussion, you meet with the dean and explain the amount of funding and support you feel your program will need to have a successful and sustainable ePortfolio initiative.
Scenario #4:
You are a program administrator placed in charge of your institution’s new ePortfolio office. As part of the annual review process for the office, you have been tasked with collecting copies of every student ePortfolio created by the institution for that year and conducting a learning assessment. After ePortfolios are collected and assessed, records must remain in an institutional repository for five years.A new instructor enters your office voicing concern about the ePortfolio assessment process. You explain that your office has developed an informed consent process for ePortfolio collection, which allows students to opt into the assessment process. To guide them and instructors in learning about data collection and consent, your office has published its data collection and management protocols on the program’s website. Included in these protocols are steps that ensure student privacy, such as separating ePortfolio links from student assessment records and de-identifying student data at the end of each year. You remind the instructor that they must attend a pre-semester workshop on ePortfolio data collection and invite them to contact you if after that workshop they have remaining questions about the process.
Resources:
- Department for Education (U.K.).(2018, Aug.). Data protection: A toolkit for schools, open beta version 1.0. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/747620/Data_Protection_Toolkit_for_Schools_OpenBeta.pdf
- Jones, B., & Leverenz, C. (2017). Building personal brands with digital storytelling ePortfolios. International Journal of EPortfolio, 7(1), 67–91.
- Newman, T., Beetham, H., & Knight, S. (2018). Digital experience insights survey 2018: Findings from students in UK further and higher education (p. 76).
- Slade, C. (2017). Using ePortfolios to strengthen student identity verification in assessment: A response to contract cheating. 2017 EPortfolio Forum EBook of Short Papers, 27–34.
- Slade, C., & Tsai, J. (2018). Building connections through integrated ePortfolio curriculum. 2018 EPortfolio Forum EBook of Short Papers, 50–56.
- The University of Queensland. (n.d.). Digital essentials. Library.
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Evaluating ePortfolios
ePortfolio evaluation should consider process, inclusion, reflective practice, and alignment with the stated objectives of the context in which the ePortfolio was created.
RATIONALE: 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:
- Blum, S., ed. (2020). Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). West Virginia University Press.
- Floridi, L. (2018). Soft ethics, the governance of the digital and the General Data Protection Regulation. Philosophical Transactions, 376, n.p. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2018.0081
- 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.
- Pettifor, J. L., & Saklofske, D. H. (2011). Fair and ethical student assessment practices. In C. Webber & J. Lupart (Eds.), Leading student assessment (pp. 87-106). Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1727-5_5
- Principles for Fair Student Assessment Practices for Education in Canada. (1993). Edmonton, Alberta: Joint Advisory Committee. https://www.wcdsb.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/36/2017/03/fairstudent.pdf
- Sanborn, H. & Ramirez, J. (2020). Artifacts in eportfolios: Moving from a repository of assessment to linkages for learning. In M. A. Dellinger & D. A. Hart (Eds.), ePortfolios@edu: What we know, what we don't know, and everything in-between (pp. 193-225). The WAC Clearinghouse: University Press of Colorado. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/portfolios/chapter10.pdf
- Schon, D. A. (1984). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action (Vol. 5126). Basic books.
- Slade, C. (2017). Using eportfolios to strengthen student identity verification in assessment: A response to contract cheating. In ePortfolios Australia 2017 Forum, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, (27-34). 20-21 September 2017.
- The National Writing Project MAP Group. (n.d.). Developing domains for multimodal writing assessment: The language of evaluation, the language of instruction. In H. A. McKee & D. N. DeVoss (Eds.) Digital Writing: Assessment and Evaluation (n.p.). Computers and Composition Digital Press.
- Torre, E. M. (2019). Training university teachers on the use of the ePortfolio in teaching and assessment. International Journal of ePortfolio, 9(2), 97-110. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1237448.pdf
- Wahleithner, J. M. (2014). The National Writing Project’s MAP: Development of a framework for thinking about multimodal composing. Computers and Composition 31(1), 79-86.
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Visibility of Labor
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.
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.
Scenario #3:
Resources:
- Conceição, S. C. O., & Lehman, R. M. (2011). Managing online instructor workload: Strategies for finding balance and success. Jossey-Bass.
- 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
- 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
- Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin.
- 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
- 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
- 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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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. - Making visible the value of iterative, long-term ePortfolio developmental processes as students bridge from academic to career environments, such as
- Strategies for Applying the Evaluating ePortfolios Principle
- Strategies for Applying the Privacy Principle
