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What purpose does it serve?
What purpose does it serve?
The course portfolio explicitly (and visibly) connects course learning outcomes, teaching methods, student feedback, and self-reflection by documenting expectations, progress made toward instructional goals and student performance. When integrated early in the course planning stages and developed in conjunction with periodic teaching assessment and reflection, the course portfolio becomes more than another item in the "to do" list of teaching faculty, but serves to document work and progress systematically, making documentation for performance review and program assessment more easily completed and accessible [1-2]. Committed to their own lifelong learning, instructors can use the portfolio to document what they are learning about themselves and their pedagogies, but also engage their students and other faculty in the process, thereby modeling the lifelong learning they want their students to embrace. Moreover, the course portfolio can be used to document learning and map course to college and institutional goals [3].
Additional benefits of course electronic course portfolios include the following:
Additional benefits of course electronic course portfolios include the following:
Provides access for self reflection, commentary, and annual merit review
Houses materials useful for department program review and accreditation
Serves as a repository of materials among instructors teaching similar courses
Inspires conversations among faculty around curriculum development
Updates easily
Is accessible and searchable with internet connection
Has multimedia capability
Allows readers to peruse sections easily
Allows external reviewers to see your course remotely (virtually) without having to meet with you one-on-one
Is printable
In order to determine how your portfolio should be developed (there are several types of course portfolios), begin by considering the following guiding questions. Answering these up front will help you determine your approach for building and maintaining your course portfolio.
The course portfolio differs from the Teaching Portfolio, which focuses on describing your teaching and professional experience, research interests, and other activities that promote your professional credentials. The templates developing the course and teaching portfolios include guiding questions, prompts, and tips for developing various topics the portfolio should cover. See Portfolio Development Resources for more information.
Guiding Questions:
Guiding Questions:
What is the purpose and context to which I am directing this portfolio?
What are the standards that the course portfolio must meet in order to serve the purpose it targets?
What types of evidence support that these standards are being met in my course?
How and when will I collect this evidence? (Should I identify points during the semester best suited for gathering evidence?)
How will the portfolio document my professional growth as a teaching practitioner as I examine the evidence of student learning in my course?
How, when, and where will I reflect?
What are the different types?
What are the different types?
Determining the type of course portfolio you want to make can help you gain new insights and provide details about your course that you otherwise may not have considered. Many instructors begin with a Benchmark portfolio and later develop portfolios that serve different purposes to reflect a variety of experiences and insights they have gleaned over time. These types can include Benchmark,Inquiry, Comprehensive, and Concept as defined by Savory and Goodburn [1] but may serve purposes beyond these classifications.
Final Words of Encouragement
Final Words of Encouragement
Through the development and continual revision of a course portfolio, the instructor models the professional behavior he/she expects her students to learn in the course and transfer in later contexts. Letting your students see your "Work in Progress" will communicate how much you value learning, encouraging students to see self assessment as integral to professional development. For example, when a faculty member creates an inquiry portfolio s/he "mirrors the approach one typically applies to disciplinary-based scholarly research" [2, p. 5]; thus, he models for his students the importance of critical thinking in "real world" applications. His students will see that the very process of inquiry and reflection is not tangential but rather integral to the kind of critical analysis and assessment that professionals in her workplace expect. "Also, once a faculty member has gone through the process of writing a course portfolio, the inquiry process for their teaching is never the same–even if a faculty member doesn’t develop another course portfolio, s/he will inevitably be asking the questions about teaching in a more reflective and systematic way" [2, p. 8].
[1] Cerbin, W. (1994). "The Course Portfolio as a Tool for Continuous Improvement of Teaching and Learning." Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 5(l), 95-105.
[2] Savory, Paul and Goodburn, Amy. (2009). "Using Electronic Faculty Course Portfolios to Showcase Classroom Practices and Student Learning." Industrial and Management Systems Engineering Faculty Publications. Paper 31. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/imsefacpub/31.
[3] Light, Penny, Chen, Helen, and Ittelson, John. (2012). Documenting Learning with ePortfolios. "Faculty Development and ePortfolios." (pp. 107-120). John Wiley & Sons.
[4] Image: Neonexus. "Light Your Way." (Blog). http://www.neonexuscorp.com/software-design/custom-database-design/. Accessed 22 May 2013.
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