Exploring ePortfolios at Northeastern

April 2008

The use of electronic portfolios to collect, reflect on, and display student work is growing at all levels of education. For students, eportfolios provide a means to reflect on their educational experiences and to showcase their best work in a digital repository. For faculty, eportfolios provide concrete evidence of student learning. For institutions, eportfolios are used to evaluate progress on meeting institutional goals. The artifacts and student reflections serve as a vehicle for assessing learning outcomes at the course, program and/or institutional level.

Over the past several years, eportfolio initiatives have been undertaken by several Northeastern programs, including Physical Therapy, Pharmacy, Biology, Computer & Information Science and the College of Business.

Last summer Susan Powers-Lee convened a working group, led by Alicia Russell and Kostia Bergman, to study requirements for an eportfolio system for Northeastern, review products and make recommendations. The group began its work by preparing a report on current eportfolio efforts at Northeastern and surveyed faculty through a global announcement and follow-up interviews.

This requirements gathering process led to the development of eight “use scenarios,” which describe current and future uses of eportfolios at Northeastern and a set of software requirements to fulfill those use scenarios. The scenarios vary from an electronic resume enhanced with work samples, to a website either pre-designed to map to program requirements or designed by students, to portfolios meeting the specific needs of visually-oriented disciplines, to systems that map performance to professional criteria or other goals/rubrics and aggregate portfolios for curriculum assessment or accreditation review.

Over the past several months the EdTech Center has been reviewing and testing products. All of the products that have received serious consideration are externally-hosted systems that allow students to download their portfolios and continue their subscriptions to the system after graduation, if they so choose. The task force plans to pilot a single product during the summer and fall of 2008, then develop a broader implementation strategy.

The work of the eportfolio task force is documented in a Blackboard course. For access to this documentation or for more information, please contact Laurie Poklop in the EdTech Center at l.poklop@neu.edu or x3157.