I attended the Assessment Institute in Indianapolis this week, thanks to Serensoft who sponsored my trip. As a staff member at Syracuse University who supported our ePortfolio project, I was curious to see how ePortfolio projects were handled at other institutions and how they used technology to support program and student assessment.
During the pre-conference workshop on ePorfolios, Bret Enyon asked the attendees to list one word that described ePortfolios for them. Here is the list:
integration(2), assessment (2), opportunity(2), committees, excitement, connections, learning, discovery, authenticity, technology, time, motivating, comprehensive, possibilities, clueless, value, frightening, emerging, important, developing, open source, experiment, innovation, responsibility, self-awareness, late, showcase, accountability, convincing
He asked everyone to rate their colleges portfolio engagement on a 1-5 scale (5 - college has system up and running full bore, 3 - good plan, 0 not at all). Here are those self assessments:
5 - 0
4 - 3
3 - 3
2 - 9
1 - 15
This left me with the feeling that the demand for ePortfolios is still a bit in the distance, but that some folks are getting ready to implement systems to support their assessment work. As someone who does a bit of independent consulting, I'd like to see more 3's and 4's, but it will probably be a couple years before the "movement" really takes off.
The Higher Education Opportunity Act that was enacted in August has placed the responsibility for setting learning outcomes and accounting for those program outcomes squarely on the shoulders of the higher ed institutions. The act will be revisited in five years to see how things are going. Sharon Hamilton sees this as an opportunity for Higher Ed to show what they can do and to craft a system of multi-institutional accountability that serves their own needs. During one of her sessions she believed that institutions working together to define sets of mutually agreed upon outcomes would serve as a means to accept and place transfer students. An agreed upon measure of student outcomes may be a more useful tool than an assumption of equivalency between classes from different institutions. Panelists agreed that teaching and learning needs to be transformed from a series of transactions to an ongoing discussion around student achievement.
The keynote speaker (Felice Nudelman from the NY Times) highlighted Epsilen (a tool that the NY Times has funded) as an example of a platform for social networking, Web 2.0 and life-long learning that would support a such a transformation. Some panelists received a round of applause after emphasizing that improving teaching and learning will not occur _because_ of tools, but because of the planning and design of the curriculum and assessment of student learning. Yet, the technology seemed to be the catalyst that enabled much of the work that was presented.
There were several presentation tracks for this conference, but I stuck to the ePortfolio presentations. I was completely surprised by the Institutional Portfolios that were presented by IUPUI and Portland State. The work that went into these inward looking self-studies of the entire university were impressive and not necessarily supported by a "portfolio system" and was largely the effort of 1 or two people to collect, process and disseminate their findings for comment.
Course portfolios were presented where faculty members voluntarily documented where in their syllabi they were addressing values in the program, examples of student work and a narrative for each course. Fellow faculty in the program would evaluate each course and provide feedback to the instructors on how to improve. Number one recommendation seemed to be to make the outcomes of the class more transparent to students through the syllabus. Number two seemed to be that the faculty didn't understand their own statements of expectations of students.
Self assessment was briefly mentioned in two presentations, but was not the main focus of the conference.
