Use Cases
Electronic portfolio systems enable a common set of activities that include collecting work samples or artifacts, reflecting on the meaning of the work in some broader context, presenting subsets of work in different formats to different audiences, and assessing individual artifacts or complete portfolios at an individual, programmatic, or curricular level. Portfolios may be developmental, showing a progression of work over time, or representational, providing a demonstration of ultimate achievement.
The goals and priorities of a particular program along these dimensions will influence the structure of a given portfolio. The following eight descriptions represent potential scenarios for portfolio uses that reflect the requirements of current and previous Northeastern portfolio projects, either in pilot or in planning.
Enhanced Resumes
An enhanced resume is an electronic resume, similar in format to a traditional resume, but enhanced by links to work samples in various media saved in a student's repository. This enables the student to provide evidence of skills gained from academic and experiential education. In the best cases this will include an opportunity to demonstrate "soft skills" such as critical thinking and problem solving. An ePortfolio system should allow a student to easily customize resumes and share them with specific employers.
Open Structure Portfolio
An open structure portfolio allows the student control over the structure of a personal website, which can be shared publicly or through restricted access to display results of research, class projects, or bodies of work. This format may be useful to graduate students involved in research as well as students in creative fields who desire extensive control over the structure and visual presentation of their work.
Developmental Completion of Program Requirements
Some programs will want students to collect evidence of their development over their academic careers, providing a view of growth over time and the opportunity to review and reflect on the meaning of work at different points. This type of portfolio typically focuses on student reflection and enables faculty to assess effectively the progression of a curriculum. It can facilitate advice from faculty mentors on important areas of improvement. The portfolio could be used, in part, to provide reflection points to help students integrate academic and experiential learning. The current Department of Physical Therapy portfolios are an example of a developmental portfolio. Other programs have expressed interest in using a portfolio approach to tracking the progress of students in Ph.D. programs.
Representational Portfolio
In a representational portfolio (sometimes called a showcase portfolio), a student presents a final picture of his/her achievement through academic and experiential education. A representational portfolio can be used for reflection on integrating educational experiences, to present authentic evidence of achievement to employers, and for curriculum assessment that measures how well students are meeting ultimate curricular goals.
Visual Showcase
Disciplines that produce primarily visual and/or media-based artifacts (i.e., art, design, photography, architecture, communication) have specific needs for the display of work, whether the portfolio is organized developmentally or representationally. A visual showcase portfolio should include some form of “gallery” of thumbnail images that can be used to scan the work in the portfolio. Thumbnails should be clickable to launch a larger view of the image/media that could include caption and description information. Students using this type of portfolio are also more likely to desire the ability to customize the overall portfolio design.
Curriculum Assessment
Curriculum assessment can be achieved through a portfolio system that allows the association of student work (artifacts) with assessment rubrics and the aggregation of work by multiple students for assessment using the rubrics. The Northeastern Department of Biology has achieved this using the Open Source Portfolio (OSP) system for representational portfolios created by students in the capstone course. The system allows faculty to compare artifacts submitted as evidence of achievement of defined criteria and to distribute the artifacts for anonymous review by expert reviewers.
Assessment of NU Core
Similar in many ways to curricular assessment, assessment of the NU core could be a university-wide portion of a portfolio system that collects writing samples and makes them available for anonymous expert review.
Demonstration of Professional Criteria
Some professional programs are required to demonstrate achievement of specific standards set by outside bodies, both for accreditation and certification of individual students. As an example, the EdTech Center has developed a database for the Physical Therapy department that maps accreditation criteria to specific courses, methods of assessment, and sample evidence of achievement (student work). Ideally, a system like this would be connected to student portfolios. Such a system would be ideal for the School of Education.
