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ePortfolios >> Hi-Octane Assessment
8/16/2005
Electronic portfolios are changing the way many colleges and universities handle student, educator, and lifelong assessment.
One good way to get to know Paul Treuer outside of his job as director of the Knowledge Management Center at the University of Minnesota-Duluth (UMD): Peruse his electronic portfolio. Treuer’s portfolio, which is password-protected, boasts a veritable dossier on his life, both personal and professional.
The portfolio contains information about his Khatsolona collapsible sea kayak; blog entries from a recent trip to Jelsa, Croatia; and a photo essay on frigid Lake Superior in winter. It also contains Treuer’s biographical statement, his curriculum vitae, and a variety of presentations he gave at the Educause National Learning Infrastructure Initiative conference in early 2005 (NLII is now the Educause Learning Initiative; www.educause.edu/eli). After spending some quality time on Treuer’s portfolio, one has the sense of really knowing the man, spectacles and all. And that’s exactly how Treuer likes it.
“The whole idea behind these ePortfolios is to give others a complete sense of what you’re all about,” says Treuer, who created the electronic portfolio system at the university. “Whether you’re using an ePortfolio as a job-hunting tool or an assessment tool, you want the people who inspect it to come away with an entirely new understanding of who you are and what you’re capable of accomplishing.”
Driven by a variety of goals—including assessment and professional development— the electronic portfolio technology has caused a good deal of excitement in the academic world during the last few years; for some schools—those fully adopting the technology—it is dramatically changing the way they require students to demonstrate competencies.
Certain institutions, such as the University of Minnesota-Duluth and the University of Iowa, have been aggressively pursuing the technology for the better part of a decade, sharpening the ePortfolio setup regularly as they fine-tune homegrown systems to better meet the needs of education and beyond. Other academic institutions, such as Villanova University (PA) and St. Lawrence University (NY), are newer to the game, and are sampling technology from at least two vendors, learning most of what they know about ePortfolios as they go along.
The Professional
Yet, perhaps no institution knows more about ePortfolios than UMD. While many recent converts to ePortfolios have opted to license technology from a variety of vendors in recent years, UMD built its open source technology from scratch, largely because there were simply no ePortfolio vendors when the institution got started.
The offering has evolved dramatically over the years, with the most striking changes coming after 2003, when the school released the code to the open source community. Today, as one of the members of the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (www.osportfolio.org), UMD is constantly requesting and accepting feedback from other open source programmers, and consistently updating and upgrading its ePortfolio effort to make it more responsive to user demands.
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