More Than Assessment: What ePortfolios Make Possible for Students, Faculty, and Curricula

Across a range of ePortfolio initiatives, scholars point to reflection as an integral part of the learning process of creating an ePortfolio (Hubert and Lewis 2014; Landis, Scott, and Kahn 2015; Penny Light, Chen, and Ittelson 2012). Reflection gives students an opportunity to document their learning, recognize and articulate the meaning of their experiences, and develop their metacognitive skills (Penny Light, Chen, and Ittelson 2012; Reynolds and Patton 2014). Since reflective writing is a key element of our initiative, we’ve devoted the final section of this article-as-ePortfolio to enacting our commitment to reflection and looking ahead to new pedagogical challenges and opportunities.

Working with faculty in the Cohort to implement ePortfolios—and with students in the workshop series to create them—has raised important questions. Specifically, we are working on how to help faculty teach visual literacy and ethical literacy, including accessibility. We certainly don’t know everything there is to know, but we are focusing our energies on learning more so we can help our faculty and students learn more. Although the ePortfolio creates an occasion for discussion around these issues, we see the importance and impact of discussions about visual and ethical literacy going far beyond ePortfolio pedagogy and creation.

Because visual literacy is crucial to effective communication in digital environments (and, of course, to creating effective ePortfolios), one of the student learning outcomes of the ePortfolio Project is visual literacy. Faculty members in some Cohort departments have told us they want help with this aspect of ePortfolio pedagogy, so we have enlisted a team of faculty from Studio Art, Consumer and Design Sciences, and Graphic Design to work together with us to create resources and programming to help faculty across disciplines learn to teach visual literacy. We are confident that the Visual Literacy Team will help us offer our faculty enhanced support for teaching the visual elements of creating ePortfolios and for teaching multimodal composition more broadly.

Another concern in our initiative is what we’re calling ethical literacy, which encompasses much more than simply giving credit where credit is due: for us, ethical literacy involves everything from following fair use guidelines to making sure photographs from study abroad programs don’t treat people as objects. For where we are now, ethical literacy includes attribution, privacy and safety, representation of others, and accessibility. The ePortfolio creates an occasion for faculty and students to grapple with these complicated issues, and the ePortfolio Project is currently working to provide information and support for this important pedagogical work.

Teaching students when and how to properly cite material or to recognize why attribution, in itself, sometimes isn’t enough is paramount to ethical literacy (Aufderheide, Jaszi and Hobbs 2008). This is especially important since media can be copied, pasted, and disseminated so easily (Common Sense Media 2016a). Because of this we believe it is essential that students are not only aware but actively engaged in ethically shaping their stories. Appropriate attribution matters, and our goal moving forward is to create an environment that facilitates students’ understanding and application of this knowledge.

In addition to attribution, we encourage students to protect their own privacy and to respect the privacy of others (Aufderheide, Jaszi, and Hobbs 2008). We teach students to carefully reflect on the type and amount of information that should be included in an ePortfolio and the potential implications of making this content public. If students are using artifacts containing other people who might be identifiable, they should in most cases ask for permission from these individuals before the ePortfolio is made public (Common Sense Media 2016b, 2016c). Doing so ensures ethical best practices and respectfully considers the privacy and safety of those involved. At times, unfortunately, these ethical considerations are (often unintentionally) glossed over, perhaps because students are accustomed to posting content containing others to social media, but this affords educators the opportunity to bridge that gap by frequently engaging students in relevant discussions about online privacy and safety.

Understandably, students often want to use photos in their ePortfolios that include other people. In some cases, like a posed group photo from a club activity, students probably don’t need to ask for permission from everyone pictured. Many other cases, however, are not so clear. For instance, a student must carefully consider the implications of using a photo of a child she met while on a service trip in her ePortfolio in order to represent favorable qualities about herself to her audience (compassion, global awareness, heart for service, etc.). Not only does the picture potentially objectify the child, but also could simultaneously invite the student’s audience to question her ethical judgment.

Students creating ePortfolios are not only afforded the opportunity to learn about ethical issues surrounding attribution, privacy and safety, and representation but also the online barriers people with disabilities face. An apt illustration from the U.S. Department of Justice reads, “poorly designed websites can create unnecessary barriers for people with disabilities, just as poorly designed buildings prevent some from entering” (2003). In terms of online accessibility, these barriers may include videos or sound files without captions or transcripts, content accessible only through precise mouse movements, or images without descriptive alternative text.

The challenges people with disabilities must overcome when navigating the Internet are often overlooked or misunderstood by those without disabilities. For example, students often create ePortfolios that lack alternative text. The different ways users access the Internet offer teachers a chance to educate students on a topic that might never come up in the general course of their academic careers. For more in-depth discussions on approaches to understanding disability, see Scotch 2000, Fajardo et al. 2009, and Kaufman-Scarborough and Childers 2009.

Teachers can explore the unique possibilities of ePortfolios through advocacy for accessible websites and design best practices. With almost 57 million people with disabilities living in the United States, online accessibility concerns clearly deserve consideration (Stoddard 2014). Students developing ePortfolios with barriers to access in mind can discover the benefits of implementing accessible features for everyone. Accessible websites benefit all users, not just those with disabilities. Generally, accessible websites are more user-friendly and easier to navigate, and accessible design best practices teach students strong, transferable technical skills. Beyond technical skills, students learn more about the world around them and their ability to act ethically in that world. Students can grow in compassion and consideration for fellow humans through carefully crafting a more user-friendly and inclusive web experience. As a Project, we’ve begun researching how best to support our faculty and students as they work to create ethically sound ePortfolios, and we will continue to provide resources and programming that further these efforts.

In conclusion, our aim in this article-as-ePortfolio has been to offer an illustrative example of what is made possible when an ePortfolio initiative prioritizes student learning. As we said at the beginning, we don’t mean to condemn institutional assessment as a whole or those who implement ePortfolios for this purpose; rather, we aim to disrupt the notion that ePortfolios are primarily an assessment tool. Moreover, we sense that the motivation of students and faculty diminishes when institutional assessment is the primary purpose of an ePortfolio initiative. If students and faculty lack the motivation to create and teach ePortfolios in rich ways, then institutions aren’t getting authentic assessments anyway.

Our implementation is certainly imperfect and challenges abound, but the kinds of challenges—How do we help students understand the ethical dimensions of representing others? How do we help faculty integrate reflective practice throughout their curriculum? What strategies can we use to teach visual literacy in non-design disciplines?—seem to us worthy of careful attention and intellectual energy. We hope that the motivation, investment, and inventiveness of the students and faculty represented here have offered inspiration and guidance for others who are doing this work.