With support from the office of the Provost, a team of SIUE faculty and staff is participating in the 2022 Institute on ePortfolios run by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).
What is an ePortfolio? An ePortfolio is a digital record of academic and co-curricular work compiled by a student and accompanied by narrative reflection on their learning process. ePortfolios serve multiple uses and audiences simultaneously. They can be used by faculty and administrators for University assessment and by faculty for process-oriented pedagogy, formative, and summative assessment. For students, an ePortfolio functions as a personal website, a public-facing record of achievements that can be shared with instructors, classmates, advisors, community groups, employers, and graduate schools.
How can ePortfolios enhance education at SIUE? For SIUE, ePortfolios are a high impact practice that will help students integrate their learning across the entire educational experience with the goals of enhancing student agency, enhancing equity, and supporting SIUE’s commitment to “foster lifelong learning.” ePortfolios enable students to synthesize their learning across courses and program requirements, create a record of their accomplishments, curate a transportable dossier of their work, and demonstrate career-readiness. This process facilitates individual and community identity development, ensuring that we embody our commitment to “respect for individuals, differences, and cultures.” ePortfolios will help SIUE guarantee equitable student outcomes. Pedagogical models that integrate ePortfolios are high impact practices that have been shown to increase student grades, retention rates, and graduation rates for at-risk students. Furthermore, ePortfolios will enhance student and program assessment practices, so that all SIUE students can become “leaders who contribute to a dynamic and diverse global community.”
ePortfolio Priorities:
- An approach that considers the whole student, emphasizing high impact practices that includes both curricular and co-curricular examples of student learning with a goal toward increasing retention and graduation rates.
- A platform that allows for back-end assessment, maps baccalaureate and major outcomes into an ePortfolio framework, and also supports student career goals.
- Innovative multimedia reflection prompts and practices grounded in research.
- Systems for supporting students and faculty through ePortfolio adoption and maintenance.