Electronic Portfolios

Designing an Electronic Portfolio System for Multiple Universities: Some Early Lessons

Monday, January 27, 2003
4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. SESS18

Ali Jafari, Professor of Computer & Information Technology, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

James Lowe, Chief Information Security Officer, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Ruth M. Sabean, Assistant Vice Provost, Educational Tech, retired, UCLA

Eric J. Splaver, CIO for College Computing, UCLA

This panel will share the benefits of lessons learned when institutions collaborate, and will consider how members of a consortium can shape future directions for development of electronic portfolios.

Representatives of the Electronic Portfolios Consortium, known as ePortConsortium, will discuss their collaborative efforts to design, develop, and deploy an electronic portfolio system to meet the needs of quite different institutions (IUPUI, UCLA, Maricopa Community College, UW-Eau Claire, and Penn State). The panel will demonstrate an early version of the Epsilen Portfolios portfolio management system software being tested at three campuses of the ePortConsortium.

Related article from NLII 2002-2003 Annual Review: "The Digital Me: Standards, Interoperability, and a Common Vocabulary Spell Progress for E-Portfolios"

Sunday, January 26, 2003
8:00 a.m. - 8:15 a.m. SESS01A

Postconference Resource

The Catalyst E-Portfolio: Using Assessment to Shape Enterprise-Wide, Learner-Centered Technologies

Monday, January 27, 2003
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. SESS01

Tom Lewis, Director, Catalyst Research & Development, University of Washington

Scott Macklin, CIO College of Education, University of Washington

In 1998, the University of Washington decided to commit significant resources to the Catalyst Initiative, a university-wide, scalable program to help all UW instructors integrate technology into their teaching. The initiative includes a suite of 10 online tools developed in-house and an informational Web site to support the use of these tools, all created through extensive and iterative consultation with UW faculty and students. In 2000, UW founded the Program for Educational Transformation Through Technology (PETTT) to investigate the use of educational technology and its effect on learning. PETTT initiated several projects to evaluate the impact of Catalyst Web Tools on student learning, including:

• Campus-wide surveys and focus groups of instructors and students to assess technology use and determine future needs.
• An experimental study of a large lecture class using Catalyst Web Tools.
• Assessment of the use of tools in instructors' courses and their impact on student learning.

The goal is to create a coordinated campus-wide approach to assessing teaching, learning, and technology to transform the development of Catalyst Web Tools, the support for teaching with these tools, and, ultimately, the way students learn. These efforts have led to the Catalyst Portfolio, an online tool that allows students to collect, annotate, arrange and display a variety of digital "artifacts" that illustrate their accomplishments throughout their university careers. Catalyst Portfolio also enables UW instructors, advisers, and career counselors to lead students through a process of reflection on their experiences and to help them choose the artifacts that show their best work. This session will describe our research and assessment methodologies and the results of our evaluation projects, and how these fed the iterative development process behind Catalyst Portfolio. We will also share preliminary results from a new study of more than 3200 freshmen to see how Catalyst Portfolio can be best used to transform student learning.

Postconference Resource