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A YZXV YZ V\d! the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology had a few simple goals. It wanted to sharpen its educational mission, broaden students’ skills, improve graduates’ job-placement rates, and give the institution better ammunition for proving its worth to accreditors.
It turned to the “electronic portfolio,” becoming one of a small but growing number of institutions using an old idea—the long-term compilation of student classwork—in a new computerized format that lets Rose-Hulman directly score student performance campuswide on a list of specific skills.
And now, as the Bush administration and Congress press colleges to do more to prove their worth, the concept is being seized upon by institutions as a way to provide quantitative proof of how they help students learn while keeping the right to define their own missions.
“Electronic portfolios are a way to generate learning as well as document learning,” said Barbara Cambridge, a co-director of the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, which organizes case studies by participating institutions. “And that’s one of the most exciting things about them.”
Hundreds of colleges use some type of electronic system for assembling and storing student work. But a few dozen, acting without federal direction and with little other outside coordination, have developed more sophisticated versions that guide assessment and curriculum development. They include both small institutions, such as Thomas College in Maine and Kapiolani Community College in Hawaii, and large ones, such as Minnesota’s state colleges and the University of Washington.
It’s not a simple or cost-free decision. Even supporters agree that making full use of electronic portfolios—computerized compilations of written assignments and exams, and even videos or artwork—can often be difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and fraught with frustration for faculty members and students, who may have to enter codes that indicate the portions of their work that satisfy various institutional requirements.
Some colleges “jump into them, [and then] they say, ‘Oh my gosh, how are we ever going to manage or afford this,’ and they back out of them,” said Lynn E. Priddy, director of education and training at the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the nation’s six regional accrediting bodies.
As part of a well-designed program, however, an electronic portfolio can “really produce excellent information about what students are learning and how well,” Ms. Priddy said.
JEREMY HOGAN FOR THE CHRONICLE
James H. Hanson, an assistant professor of structural engineering at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, incorporates the teaching of professional skills like ethics and leadership into his classes. Electronic portfolios help the institute evaluate its progress in teaching such skills.
a series of “professional skills” it wants students to master in areas that include leadership, teamwork, communication, and ethics.
The process involves asking faculty members to consider all opportunities for incorporating those professional skills into existing courses. One assistant civil-engineering professor, James H. Hanson, asked students in his structural-mechanics class to consider ways of rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But rather than calculate the optimal design for a new levee system, Mr.
can quickly find only those portions of the assignments—perhaps as little as a sentence or two—that apply to the criteria assigned to their team.
The results allow Rose-Hulman officials to see how effectively the college is teaching each of the skills and to revise its approach as necessary as the college seeks to establish a unified campuswide vision of what a Rose-Hulman education means.
Before Rose-Hulman adopted its electronic portfolio system, in 1997, departments and
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The Rose-Hulman Institute, which is known for its undergraduate science and engineering programs, is one of the nation’s earliest adopters of electronic portfolios and one of their most fervent advocates. The institute has designed three different versions of its own RosE Portfolio system over the past decade for its students to submit and store their class work and materials electronically.
Rose-Hulman’s 1,800 students learn traditional technical skills in such subjects as chemistry, civil engineering, mathematics, and physics. The college has also established
Hanson wanted his students to evaluate how various repair options might affect culture, economics, and public opinion in the storm-ravaged city.
At the end of each academic year, Rose-Hulman administrators gather faculty members who volunteer to work in two-person teams to review students’ electronic portfolios and determine how well the college did in each of 25 separate criteria that define the desired professional skills.
Because the portfolio software allows students to flag the portions of their work that apply to each criterion, the faculty reviewers
faculty members pursued separate missions, said Arthur B. Western, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. They operated, he said, like “independent contractors connected by a common plumbing system.”
&EDERAL 0RESSURE
Getting colleges to establish more systematic ways of setting goals and measuring their progress has been a key objective of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. The secretary, in response to recommendations from her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, last year suggested a specific set of
tests and other measures to judge and compare colleges. Under pressure from colleges, she later made clear that she believed each institution should define its own mission, as long as it developed clear methods for measuring that success.
Electronic portfolios give colleges that very opportunity, said Ms. Cambridge.
The tasks of setting institutionwide goals and overseeing faculty practices and curricula “are now more in potential for alignment than they probably have ever been,” she said. “And part of that is because we now have the evidence that can be collected and shared in e-portfolios.”
Electronic portfolios simplify the process of setting learning objectives and meeting them, said Peter T. Ewell, vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems. And as the advantages of electronic portfolios become clearer, he said, he expects more institutions to begin to use them.
Many already have. Institutions that use such systems as part of a comprehensive approach to measuring self-improvement include Alverno College, George Mason University, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, and the for-profit, online Capella University chain.
Other colleges are trying it on a more-limited basis, such as within a particular academic discipline. Electronic portfolios are being used in programs of writing at the University of Georgia, psychology at Clemson
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