In recent years, ePortfolios have been identified as a student-centred learning tool that can facilitate high impact pedagogical practices (Kuh, 2008). ePortfolio implementation has the potential to encourage learners to reflect on their learning and make connections between and across various experiences and knowledge. For teachers, ePortfolios are a tool they can use to enhance students’ development of the skills, attitudes, and knowledge that form the learning outcomes of specific courses or programs while assessing the degree to which students have met those learning outcomes.
At Carleton, one of the challenges instructors faced when implementing ePortfolios at the course level was the question of how to evaluate the work students produced. Because ePortfolios enable students to demonstrate their learning using unique, multimodal artifacts, the instructors found it difficult to reliably assess the variety of unique expressions of learning found in their students’ portfolios. The instructors found that already available rubrics were either designed for program level portfolios, included too much course-specific content, or were not open access. In response, our ePortfolio Faculty Learning community drafted an interactive, modifiable rubric that faculty from multiple disciplines can easily adapt to grade their students’ portfolios. The structure and content of the rubric was drawn from existing resources, ePortfolio research, and instructors’ personal insights from using ePortfolios in their courses. Faculty have applied these rubrics successfully adapting them to their particular courses and educational needs.
Participants in this session will work in small groups to apply the rubric to examples of student ePortfolios from different disciplines and levels of study. The rubrics will be shared as an open education resource (OER).
ReferencesAmerican Association of Colleges and Universities (2009).
VALUE Rubrics. Retrieved from
https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics Chen, H. L., & Mazow, C. (2002). Electronic learning portfolios and student affairs.
NASPA NetResults.
Connect to Learning (2014). Catalyst for learning. Retrieved from:
http://c2l.mcnrc.org/g Kuh, G. D. (2008).
Excerpt from High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Light, T. P., Chen, H. L., & Ittelson, J. C. (2011).
Documenting learning with ePortfolios: A guide for college instructors. John Wiley & Sons.
