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Home Page: Implications of IT for the
Shape of a College Education The fifth of the five
defining outcomes of a liberal education as described by the
Association of American Colleges and Universities:
5)
Habits of
mind that foster integrative thinking and the ability to
transfer skills and knowledge from one setting to
another—achieved and demonstrated through advanced
research and/or creative projects in which students take
the primary responsibility for framing questions,
carrying out an analysis, and producing work of
substantial complexity and quality.
Among the more important strategies
for fostering integrative thinking are capstone courses and
ePortfolios. Technology can play roles in both by a) making
it possible for students to work on more complex,
interdisciplinary and motivating projects, and b) making it
possible for there to be an audience or users of the
student's work going beyond an individual faculty member.
The references below have been
selected to help you thinking about how to use ePortfolios.
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Alverno College's
Digital Diagnostic Portfolio was one of the
first web-based system that made it easy for students
and faculty to examine progress of students toward
institution's goals for general education and the major.
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Indiana University
Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) defined
six Principles of Undergraduate Learning (PULs) in
1998: learning outcomes such as communications skill and
critical thinking that are supposed to emerge from the
totality of the undergraduate's education, not just
general education courses or the first two years of the
program. Created in part due to pressure from regional
accreditors, the PULs provided the groundwork both for a
common core curriculum. All courses were supposed to use
the PULs in crafting their syllabi. Observation that
this inclusion was sometimes perfunctory "reinforced the
need to determine the extent to which the PULs were
playing a significant role in .. undergraduate
learning," said Prof. Sharon Hamilton of IUPUI. Hamilton
was asked to head a committee that would study the
emerging curriculum and make recommendations. The
committee suggested building on
iPort, IUPUI's institutional portfolio program by
creating
ePort, a portfolio program for undergraduates.
Six faculty communities of practice have now also been
organized, one for each PUL. Hamilton, Associate Dean
of the Faculty and in charge of the ePort effort, sees
many impacts of this combination of PULs, ePortfolio,
and faculty communities of practice, including a more
coherent view of learning by both students and faculty,
more emphasis on student projects and documentation of
student work with audio and video, and a framework and
process more open to change (e.g., evolving definition
of student communication skills so that more emphasis is
put on student ability to community using the multimedia
and linking capabilities of the Web). Hamilton wrote
about this initiative in
"A Principle-Based
Approach to Assessing General Education,” Journal of
General Education. 52:4 2004. 283-303.
Click here for the text of
her article.
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What do students need to learn in
order to create effective portfolios? This report
from Janice Fournier at the University of Washington
reports on research on this topic. UW's Catalyst Program
ran a competition for student portfolios.
The report summarizes criteria developed for a close
study of these portfolios.
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TLT Group subscriber resource:
EPortfolio software is a means to help students and
others do things differently. The TLT Group has
developed a guide for formative evaluation of
ePortfolio initiatives: in other words, a guide to
gathering the kinds of data that can help a program
succeed in doing things differently with that ePortfolio
software. For example, suppose one of your goals is to
have more outside assessment of student work. Formative
evaluation would track who is assessing student work and
analyze reasons why some students are getting more
outside feedback than other students do on their
portfolios. If your institution is a TLT Group
subscriber,
click here to see the Flashlight Guide to Planning and
Formative Evaluation of E-Portfolio Initiatives;
you'll need
your
institution's username and password for our web site..
If your institution is not yet a subscriber,
click here to see the first draft of this Guide.
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General background about ePortfolios:
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Electronic Portfolios: Emerging
Practices in Student, Faculty, and Institutional
Learning, Washington, D.C. AAHE, 2001 (Barbara
Cambridge, Susan Kahn, Kathleen Blake Yancey). This
is the first published compendium of information
about a wide range of electronic portfolios. It
captures the early days of electronic portfolio
conceptualization and design, and discusses both
potential and pitfalls. It is still timely for those
considering adopting or developing an electronic
portfolio.
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North Carolina State has an
extensive resource page on assessment. Search on
the word "portfolio" to see a variety of resources,
including a listserv.
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Does your institution use technology in
this way, or other ways, to help students learn to pull
the pieces together and apply what they've learned in
one field to problems in another field? Please send your
suggestions for this web site to Steve Ehrmann
(ehrmann@tlgroup.org)
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For a related TLT Group web page on the
use of student e-portfolios to help faculty guide
students' education and reshape the academic program,
click here.
Home Page: Implications of IT for the
Shape of a College Education
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Phone:
301.270.8312/Fax: 301.270.8110
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To talk about our work
or our organization
contact: Sally Gilbert |
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