ePortfolios

What is an ePortfolio?

A portfolio is a narration of learning — a story of our accomplishment and learning — that can document a process of inquiry and reflection. Folio thinking is a philosophy and practice (and the "e" means it is combined with technology) to help our students capture artifacts of their learning — whether a paper, video, discussion post, blog post, composition or poem — and reflect with wisdom and insight on their course of study, their society and themselves. An ePortfolio breaks the artificial boundaries across courses and between school and “real life.”

Here are some examples of ePortfolios:

Videos about ePortfolios (both 2:30 minutes)

What can a student do with an ePortfolio?

    • Collect work that they've done, in an electronic format, for re-use later.
    • Organize their work.
    • Reflect on their work, to make connections with previous experience, across courses, and between school and work.
    • Showcase their work to different audiences, for different purposes:
      • Graduate school application — to show the quality of their previous academic work.
      • Their family and friends — to share work that they are proud of.
      • The student themselves — to reflect on all they've accomplished, and celebrate.
      • Their teacher — to provide evidence of what they've learned, get feedback, and show their progress over time.
      • A potential employer — to demonstrate their skills, knowledge and abilities.

What People Are Saying About ePortfolios

Student

Putting my portfolio together made me feel pride and joy.

Employer

The single most important skill to help potential employees get in the door is the ability to self-reflect and to be able to articulate the connections between their experiences and the needs of the job they're applying for. They need to be able to concisely articulate what they did (skill, competency or ability), how they did it (a story), and why they did it (thought process about the choices they made). Creating an ePortfolio is the process of engaging in collection, organization, reflection and connection that leads to a person's ability to speak intelligently and concisely about the what, how and why. In other words, to tell the story about themselves.

Instructor

Students who wait until their senior seminar or capstone course to try to pull together and organize their work, to show that they have achieved a required learning outcome, often discover that they don't have copies of the work they were going to use to demonstrate that achievement — they don't have that computer any more or it crashed, the files are on a thumb drive they can't find anymore . . .