E-Portfolios in Higher Education Settings - A Literature Review

Editor's Notes

• #2: Questions on how to (best) implement e-portfolios and what instructional outcomes to expect are discussed on many university campuses. While it is often proclaimed that e-portfolios have great potential to engage students and promote deep learning, implementing e-portfolios is a complex process. What should administrators, students, faculty and instructors expect when implementing e-portfolios in their program or course? In the following 20 minutes, I will present some highlights of a recent literature review on e-portfolios in higher education.
• #3: Portfolios are a hot topic. In a recent edition of the magazine Peer Review that is published by the American Association for Universities, Susan Kahn, who is the director of the Indiana and Purdue University portfolio initiative, stated that we are on the ‘brink of an era of expanded adoption and impact of e-portfolios’. Portfolios have gained significant interest as an authentic assessment tool to monitor and demonstrate competence development. According to the 2013 Educause survey on the use of information technology in undergraduate education, 57 percent of US postsecondary institutions state that they made some use of e-portfolios in the past year.
• #4: My personal motivation to delve deeper into the topic of e-portfolios stems from my work as an Instructional Analyst at UNC School of Government. In the past 2 years, our Master of Public Administration Program shifted from a capstone project to an e-portfolio and oral exam process for graduation. In the Carolina MPA program the student portfolio is a pivotal piece of the new, competence-oriented curriculum. Students use the portfolio to document their level of competence in central learning outcomes of the program. It needs to pass a three person faculty review committee, before students can move on to the final oral exam. This spring, the first cohort completed the portfolio process. When it came to evaluating and reflecting our portfolio experiences, we asked ourselves – what are the benchmarks of success? Is it enough if our students and our faculty are fairly happy with the process? What experiences do other campuses have?
• #5: An e-portfolio is a systematically curated exhibition of learning products. Students use their portfolios to collect their work, select and highlight examples they want to showcase, and to reflect, discuss and potentially even advance their learning. The collection as a whole presents the student’s learning goals, learning processes, and learning outcomes. These processes are basically the same for printed portfolios or e-portfolios. The electronic format makes it easy to link artifacts and reflections and allows to include a richer variety of content such as multimedia elements or datasets.
• #10: Chau & Cheng (2010) stated: “Implementing e-portfolios is a complex process fraught with challenges and dilemmas” (466).
• #11: Chau & Cheng (2010) stated: “Implementing e-portfolios is a complex process fraught with challenges and dilemmas” (466).
• #13: The body of literature included in this review was accumulated primarily through queries in ERIC, with supporting research in Google Scholar, Science Direct, ResearchGATE and EdITLib, using the search terms ‘electronic portfolio(s)’ and ’e-portfolio(s)’. The criteria for inclusion were   Peer-reviewed journal article, English language, Higher education context, Published between 2004-2014, Context information on pedagogical goals, instructional design or assessment, Empirical data on portfolio outcomes in a specific course or program.   Each article was read carefully to document the curricular integration of the portfolio, the subject domain and degree, the institution, the country or region, details on class size or cohort, the goals and motivation for implementing the portfolio, the instructional design of the course or assignment, the portfolio assessment and the infrastructure deployed for generating the portfolios. In addition, the specific research questions and method of inquiry, information on the research subjects as well as outcomes of the research process were documented in a spreadsheet.
• #14: Goal and Motivation: Why implement portfolio processes in the first place? Common drivers for portfolio integration at a program level are accreditation standards and the goal to enable competence-oriented assessment. Other frequently stated reasons for using portfolios are fostering reflection, self-regulated learning and development of metacognitive awareness, e.g., ‘creating independent learners able to monitor their own learning’ (Siu, 2013), ‘enhance students' ability to engage in a reflective cycle’ (Pelliccione & Raison, 2009). Related goals are reflective leadership and reflective professionalism: ‘Enter a shared-goal conversation that values the educational leader and his or her expertise’ (Hyland & Kranzow, 2012), ‘Fostering critical reflection as means of developing expertise, as critical self-surveillance whereby professional experiences are revisited and explored’ (McNeill, Brown & Shaw, 2010). Other motives are to increase student autonomy as to what they choose to present or withhold for assessment, offer a digital space where students can present evidence of employability skills and create a community of practice that extends interaction beyond class time.
• #15: Curricular Integration: Portfolios differ in their curricular integration. Portfolios can be introduced at the beginning of the program for students’ ongoing engagement with the process of selecting and reflecting on learning products. Students document growth and development as they navigate the curriculum (cf. Hopper, Sanford & Bonsor-Kurki, 2012; Tran, Baker & Pensavalle, 2005). More typically, portfolio courses are offered as a graduation requirement course during the last term. In some cases, instructors use e-portfolios as an individual course assignment in elective or required courses.
• #16: Scaffolds: Most portfolio processes include some kind of scaffolding to help guide student development (Fitch, Peet, Reed & Tolman, 2008). Several publications attribute portfolio guides, rubrics, frequent instructor feedback, technical support, portfolio workshops and peer learning opportunities to positive portfolio outcomes. Instructors have a key role to play when students are called upon to construct e-portfolios to enhance deep reflection and analyze what they learned (Brandes, 2008). As Fitch et al. (2008) stated, scaffolding may be especially instrumental in helping students reflect on and integrate their various classroom and field experiences. Few publications provide details on the scaffolds or instructional prompts associated with the portfolio. An exception is a course design described by Brandes (2008), in which students were asked to find metaphors to highlight their understanding of teaching, learning, and the use of technology. The students then used these central metaphors to structure their portfolios. owe
• #17: Infrastructure: The systems and tools reported comprised self-developed solutions, specialized portfolio platforms (Blackboard ePortfolio, Mahara, PebblePad, TaskStream, Open Source Portfolio), Microsoft Office components (Word, PowerPoint), HTML-editors (Frontpage, Dreamweaver), and web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, GoogleSites). Half of the articles reviewed did not provide any details about the technical infrastructure deployed for implementing the portfolios.
• #18: Assessment: Although portfolios are often praised as an authentic assessment strategy, little is known about how to establish fair and transparent processes for assessing the portfolio itself. Very few publications discuss the assessment aspect and describe how portfolios were evaluated. Rubrics, marking criteria and evaluation templates appear to be a common approach to generate transparency and clarify expectations (Mason, Pegler & Welller, 2004; Rowley & Dunbar-Hall, 2012; Wakimoto & Lewis, 2014; Zawacki-Richter, Hanft & Bäcker, 2011). Brandes (2008) described a course in which students developed criteria for the evaluation of portfolios. As Fitch et al. (2008) reported, faculty may struggle with the idea why one should assess assignments already graded.
• #19: Reflection: In what ways can e-portfolios contribute to reflective practices? Many portfolio projects stated the goal to ‘create reflective leaders’, ‘reflective professionals’ or ‘engage students in a reflective cycle’. As Chau & Cheng (2010) observed: “Regardless of whether or not writing is in the form of self-reflection or peer feedback, students may conceive and shape writ­ten messages based on institutional requirements” (475). McNeill, Brown & Shaw (2010) stated that further research is needed to explore factors that enable or inhibit the use of the e-portfolio for reflection and whether recorded reflection is a true picture of the cognitive process involved. The authors raise the question as to whether participants who did not have fluent writing skills were able to fully convey the cognitive processes involved in reflection, or indeed, whether participants who were accomplished writers could appear to attain deeper levels of reflection. Learning: It seems that the reception of portfolios is a crucial aspect of the portfolio process: “We must consider viewing the e-portfolios as learning opportunities for the students who construct them, as well as those who view them” (Brandes, 2008). Experience with portfolios across different settings suggest that students learn from other students’ portfolios, e.g. Wakimoto & Lewis (2014, 57): “Students were also encouraged to share access to their eportfolio with their fellow cohort members. This created an interactive community of practice where students could discuss, reflect, and evaluate individual understanding of professional practice”. Portfolios offer insights into the ways how students perceive, interpret and transform the learning objectives underpinning the curriculum. They provide the faculty with means to support and monitor student learning toward expected standards of the program (Parker, Ndoye & Ritzhaupt, 2012).