Getting Started
The ePortfolio consultant in the IUPUI Center for Teaching and Learning will be an important partner in helping you develop the particular ePort tool that will best achieve your goals. Your consultations will be most productive if you think through some basics before your first appointment.
First, clarify for yourself what it is that you want to experiment with or accomplish with ePortfolio. The more specifically you can articulate for yourself your need or interest, the more easily you can communication to others your intention. And since there are numerous small decisions to make in developing a matrix or presentation templates, having a clear understanding at the outset can help you stay on track. ePort can fulfill many kinds or combinations of purposes, but your progress will depend on your ability to describe clearly the outcome you envision.
Consider, too, who else needs to be part of your planning. If your goal is to have a tool to manage student reflection within a single course without other significant changes, it may be feasible to develop the matrix independently. Adopting ePort at the program or departmental level, however, will require consensus among faculty colleagues about overall program review strategies as well as specific actions. In that process, valuable new ideas may emerge for incorporation. Members of the ePort Executive Committee can arrange to meet with you and your colleagues to present basic information and answer questions about ePort or help a departmental committee map a process for your project.
It will be helpful to consider the readiness of all those who will use the ePort tool you develop. Most IUPUI students will have some familiarity with Oncourse, including familiar labels and methods of sending messages or attaching files. Not all are equally adept, though, or they may be recent transfers still learning the tools here, so the instructions you provide will need to take their experience into account. If you expect to have industry or professional representatives (such as internship supervisors) serve as evaluators of student portfolios, you will probably want to field-test your matrix with them before adopting a final version. They may be quite proficient with technology but completely unfamiliar with course management system conventions or Oncourse behaviors and thus need explanations you have not anticipated.
One way to begin identifying questions or decision points is to start sketching a matrix by whatever method you find most comfortable: paper and pencil, Microsoft Word table, Excel spreadsheet, or some other familiar software. What will be your rows (sometimes evaluation criteria or outcome characteristics)? What will be the columns (often but not always intervals for collecting pieces of work, sometimes courses or types of learning experience)? What items do you envision students putting into those boxes? Do you want students to have the opportunity to request feedback on drafts prior to revision for evaluation? Who will evaluate the student work (you, a faculty team, peers, one or more external reviewers)? How does each cell or row or column contribute to your goal?
If your interest is in web showcases or presentations that your students can develop for external and internal audiences, other questions come to mind. Are there certain sections you want everyone to include (e.g., at least a resume page and a philosophy page)? Based on your knowledge of your students, will you need to provide some guidance about common professional or graduate-school expectations? Do you want them to include reflections about the reasons they choose particular projects or artifacts for inclusion? Will these showcase portfolios be evaluated, and if so, by whom and for what purposes?
When your ideas have begun to take form, schedule an appointment with the ePort consultant at the CTL. That discussion will help you further clarify what you want and what decisions you need to make next. At some point, perhaps after a second or third meeting, it may be best to get a test site and simply start experimenting. It is possible to start small and then add columns or rows to a matrix later. Not every detail must be perfect before the matrix begins to take shape.
As you begin to understand how ePort functions for different purposes, keep checking this web site for announcements about workshops related to using ePort. Previous topics have included curriculum mapping, rubric development, and reflection as well as basic introductions to ePort. In addition, there are usually several opportunities in the course of a year to hear presentations by others engaged in using ePort for a variety of creative purposes. You will also find here the names of colleagues who have been in your shoes and are willing to share their experience with you.
