The Trouble with Portfolios
Our previous PT3 grant funded the LSB's development/training/use of a homegrown Learning Management System that we called Dialogue. When the School of Education received another PT3 grant a couple of years ago we considered adding more functionality to Dialogue to support "portfolio creation", a popular trend in education today. We later decided not to expand our Dialogue system but to build a new system just for the creation of portfolios.
While we were considering this, the School of Education was preparing for an NCATE accreditation review. Several faculty were interested in the use of portfolio systems to meet requirement #2 of NCATE. In a nutshell, this requirement states that the college has to have an information system that allows faculty to see whether or not they are effective in teaching students. The implication is that the system must be aware of the objectives of the institution and faculty and be able to report back some data about how students are progressing in relation to those objectives.
When the college looks at its options for providing this information system, there doesn't appear to be a lot of options. On the one hand, traditional courseware systems like Blackboard (Syracuse's enterprise system) and our own Dialogue system seem to meet so many of faculty needs for disseminating material, collecting assignments and providing discussion boards, etc., but they don't really provide a way to report on progress toward goals. The "portfolio building" software at first glance seems targeted to fill this gap. In fact, many of these systems seem to be specialists in just this sort of reporting.
From what I have seen and heard, schools are using these portfolio systems as "turn it in again" systems. This doesn't sit well with me. If, at its core, accreditation requirements dictate a report on student work as it relates to the college's stated goals it seems that this should be able to be built into the courseware. The requirement implies that faculty should be very aware of the institutional and class goals that they are addressing when they ask their students to engage in an activity, whether it be an assignment, a quiz or an online discussion. This view of student activity would seem to me to be very valuable to program coordinators and individual faculty as they reflect on their own teaching.
So, how do you implement or design a system that encourages faculty to consider these concepts and reflect on them over time? Do you implement a portfolio system and ask students to turn in work they already turned in for class again so we can run a special report? This doesn't make sense to me, yet so many universities are doing it. If the bulk of what you want your faculty to look at and reflect on is their students' coursework and you have a courseware system in place and people trained on how to use it, its seems that an enhancement to that system is what you really need, not a "portfolio" system.
There are many good reasons to implement a portfolio system. Many people seem to think that students really start to "get it" when they start talking about their own learning and they have an opportunity to hear others feedback about it. I understand this concept. My understanding of this is that the jury is still out as to whether or not this actually improves student learning or not. I personally think that it probably does for some learners, but not for others. Does your institution feel like student portfolios are an important instrument for teaching and learning? Or does it feel that portfolios are going to allow them to run reports for accreditation? Or both? Or neither?
The LSB is looking to enhance existing courseware tools in Sakai with our goal aware tools projects. Goal Aware Sakai courseware tools and the OSP portfolio toolset provide an exciting setting to provide options for faculty who want to explore portfolios while providing an enhanced traditional courseware suite that will meet accreditation and program review needs of the college.