Our Campus ePortfolio Project
We are a Associate’s/2-year College
Our institution serves 20,000+ students (headcount).
Our campus has been working with ePortfolios for: 8 or more years
We currently use Digication as our ePortfolio platform(s)
Each year 10,000 (approx) students use ePortfolio, that’s about 55% of our total enrollment.
We currently have institution_wide program(s) and/or majors actively using ePortfolio.
We currently have approximately More than 50 faculty using ePortfolios in their courses.
We currently have 6+ full-time staff devoted to eP.
Our campus ePortfolio leadership team has 7+ members.
Our campus leadership team is comprised of Faculty, Staff, Administration
Students play a significant role in supporting our implementation by serving as ePortfolio peer mentors and lab assistants.
We ask students to help build an ePortfolio culture on our campus by: Participating in campus-wide showcase events, Participating in department-focused showcase events, Sharing their ePortfolios on our ePortfolio website, Contributing to ePortfolio videos and publications
ePortfolio is used for Assessment on our campus at the:
The current scope of ePortfolio-related professional development is:
Our professional development is provided via: Short focused training workshops or webinars, Summer institutes, Sustained Seminars
The focus of our ePortfolio-related professional development is:
Our campus ePortfolio initiative gathers these types of evaluation data:
Thinking broadly, the following list represents our ePortfolio program goals ranked in order of importance:
The current scope of ePortfolio use for pedagogical purposes to enhance student success at our campus is:
The maturity of ePortfolio use for pedagogical purposes to enhance student success at our campus is:
The scope of our campus’ usage of ePortfolio for assessment is:
The maturity of our campus’ usage of ePortfolio for assessment is:
Overall (thinking holistically and considering not only pedagogy and outcomes assessment but also ePortfolio culture and the scaling up process), we would place our campus is in the following quadrant:
Going deeper but limited in scale
Our Scaling Up Story
From just over 800 ePortfolios in its pilot year (2002) to approximately 68,000 in Fall 2011, and potentially over 80,000 as of Fall 2012, LaGuardia Community College’s ePortfolio initiative is strong. First introduced by Dean (now Provost) Paul Arcario to the College, our portfolio (now ePortfolio) initiative has emerged as an adhesive to connect and catapult the ways students, faculty, and staff think about and support teaching and learning in our technologically motivating society.
LaGuardia Community College’s most recent (Spring 2012) Middle States Accreditation report, singled out the College’s ePortfolio culture as exemplary. The progress of our ePortfolio initiative is a result of our efforts to use this pedagogical tool as a network of connections and as a catalyst for change. In Scaling Strategies and ePortfolio as a Catalyst for change, Randy Bass notes, “Both of these dimensions -- in their broadening and deepening effects -- are critical for ePortfolio leadership teams to consider as they seek to scale and institutionalize ePortfolio on their campuses.”
With support from LaGuardia Community College’s top-level administration, Dr. Gail O. Mellow, President, Dr. Paul Arcario, Provost, and Dr. Bret Eynon, Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs, and Founding Director of the Making Connections National Resource Center, the College’s ePortfolio initiative has advanced an important and timely conversation on teaching and learning in the 21st century -- with particular emphasis on student engagement via new media technologies, professional development, and outcomes assessment. Across the disciplines, majors, courses, etc., our scaling up success is defined by the necessary steps we are taking to educate faculty and staff about ePortfolio best practices, continuously measure students’ progress, and confront new challenges and opportunities.
Leading LaGuardia Community College’s efforts to educate and engage faculty and staff in conversations about best ePortfolio pedagogical practices is our robust ePortfolio Leadership Team. The ePortfolio Leadership Team is a cross-campus collaboration between faculty and staff that convenes on a monthly basis to discuss the current state of the College’s ePortfolio practices and to go beyond the fundamentals to share deeper levels of insight that help guide, promote, and sustain the College’s ePortfolio initiative.
Building connections with faculty and staff is central to the work of the ePortfolio Leadership Team. Professional development seminars such as Connected Learning: ePortfolio and Integrative Pedagogy, Strengthening Core Learning: Competencies, Integration and Student Success, and The Art of Advising: Learning and Implementing Holistic Advisement Skills are amongst the projects that are endorsed by this committee to advance ePortfolio as a catalyst for change at the College. These professional development seminars bring together faculty and staff from across the College and encourages them to look across the disciplines, majors, courses, etc., and think deeply about how we can integrate the value of ePortfolio practices into the daily curricula -- in an effort to help students connect their diverse experiences, bridge the gap between curricular and co-curricular activities, explore learning-centered advisement, etc. Faculty and staff in these seminars create ePortfolios to document their professional growth, learning through this hands-on process and discovering new ways of implementing ePortfolio meaningfully and effectively with their students. The focus is on building connections -- between students and their classmates, between students and faculty, and between students and audiences outside of the classroom -- made visible through the ePortfolio.
As it relates to using ePortfolio as a network for connections, this aspect of the College’s scaling up efforts is exhibited by the work that has been and will be done by specific academic programs, particularly the professional majors (e.g., Accounting, Business, Nursing, Engineering, Education, Physical Therapy Assistant, etc.). For example, ePortfolio pedagogy has become a fixture in the work of accounting and business faculty and staff to address the needs of our students. The following demonstrate a few of the steps the Business and Technology Department has taken to integrate ePortfolio as a pedagogical tool to facilitate the daily teaching and learning experience:
- Recognizing that a majority of students taking accounting and business related courses are required to register for the course titled Introduction to Business, this course is targeted as a venue to (a) introduce students to ePortfolio; (b) provide students with the opportunity to develop objectives and goals; (c) help students start the process of archiving pieces of their work; and (d) allow students the prospect of reflecting on their learning.
- Specific courses that many students register for in the various programs, the department offers, have been selected as a way to help students effectively work on and develop specific skill set. For example, all students completing Business Law I are required to develop their proficiency in oral communication by completing various related assignments in this course. All students completing Principles of Accounting II are required to strengthen their proficiency in quantitative literacy and technology, specifically as it relates to using Excel, by completing an Excel based computerized accounting project.
- An employer focus group was conducted where students presented their ePortfolios to industry professionals, and faculty, staff, and, students received valuable feedback about the strengths of the department’s ePortfolio practices, areas needing to be further examined or reexamined, etc.
How do we measure progress? The significant work that the College has been doing around outcomes assessment is another example that reveals our scaling up efforts for using ePortfolio as a network for connections. We continue to make strategic, ongoing developmental progress as it relates to institutional assessment and assessment in the program/major. Recently, the first Benchmark Assessment teams were brought together to read student work across six of the College’s seven core competencies. Teams of faculty were trained on the rubric for the competency it was assessing and then read materials deposited into the assessment segment of student ePortfolios (in some cases, additional samples were pulled from the legacy ePortfolios in the Concord system). The goal was to enrich the assessment data by looking at general education competencies outside of the major. This benchmark assessment reading was developed to augment the findings from Periodic Program Reviews. The Periodic Program Review process allows departments to design studies to assess student progress within a program/major. This is a rich source of assessment data for the College. However, it does not provide a comprehensive overview of general education. The benchmark assessment process was designed to look at student work deposited at 25 credits and under and over 45 credits. Part II: Developmental History of our scaling up story provides more details on the College’s assessment efforts to collect a rich array of data to illustrate the impact of ePortfolios on student learning. This work and the results have been critical in solidifying support from the College's top-level administration.
Looking at our progress, there are significant challenges to LaGuardia Community College’s ePortfolio initiative. Amongst the challenges we face at this time are the following:
- The basic challenge of evaluating full ePortfolios is still ahead of us. The College has long studied basic elements such as retention, comparison data between ePortfolio and non-ePortfolio courses (in key areas such as student engagement, critical thinking, writing, technological literacy). However, it seems that the time to assess the ePortfolio in totality is rapidly approaching.
- Having an ePortfolio platform that is versatile enough to support 21st century media savvy learners is a issue that warrant continuous attention.
- As is the case on many campus, buy-in is an issue. The work of the College’s ePortfolio Leadership Team and professional development activities will continue to be a gateway to introduce and support those who are skeptical about the value of ePortfolio practices.
Recognizing these and other challenges present important opportunities to expand the scope of LaGuardia Community College’s ePortfolio practices. As part of the College’s vision to use ePortfolio as a catalyst and connector for broader institutional change, we recognize that the following areas, amongst others, hold great potential for further ePortfolio exploration and integration:
- Advisement - academic, transfer, and career.
- Teaching Hybrid/Online courses.
- Academic assessment (programmatic and institutional) and accreditation.
- Reflective or social pedagogy practices.
- First-Year Experience practices.
Developmental History:
Though the twelve-year history of ePortfolio at LaGuardia is relatively short by historical standards, it represents a remarkable evolution of both technology and practice at the college that is too extensive and complex to convey in detail here. For our purposes, then, we will focus our “scaling-up” narrative on four key decisions that most significantly shaped the program as it exists today:
1. To allow LaGuardia faculty to shape the course of ePortfolio at the college
From its inception in 2001, LaGuardia’s ePortfolio initiative has been faculty-driven. Following the college’s receipt of a cooperative Title V grant with New York City College of Technology, LaGuardia launched a preliminary research year during which a team of faculty traveled the country studying ePortfolio efforts at other colleges and drafting a formal report of its findings. In the following year, twenty-two faculty from across the disciplines helped to pilot LaGuardia’s first ePortfolio platform, a homegrown FTP system, experimenting with ePortfolio pedagogy in the classroom and sharing their experiences. The seeding of ePortfolio continued via attachment to First-Year Academies, learning communities for basic skills students, whose faculty honed their approaches through participation in a year-long professional development seminar.
2. To utilize student peer mentors as a resource for students and faculty
In 2003-04, to help facilitate the transition to its first commercial ePortfolio platform, LaGuardia introduced a non-credit Studio Hour facilitated by student peer mentors. Called ePortfolio Consultants, these peer mentors provided critical tutorial support for students as they learned how to build their ePortfolios, guided cohorts of nominated ePortfolio Scholars through an advanced portfolio development process, and helped to host the first college-wide Student ePortfolio Showcase. The ePortfolio Consultants have been and continue to be instrumental to the success of ePortfolio at LaGuardia; a more detailed analysis of their impact is available here.
3. To prioritize outcomes data
The success of the Studio Hour model in the First-Year Academies led to its subsequent adoption by the Co-operative Education Department in a required college-wide course for students in their second-semester called Fundamentals of Professional Advancement, whose much larger enrollment pool afforded new opportunities for collecting and measuring outcomes data on a larger scale. LaGuardia had already begun to attract national attention for the visual richness of its student ePortfolios; now, it had a sizeable collection of data to illustrate the impact of those ePortfolios on student learning. In the years since, LaGuardia has routinized its data collection around ePortfolio to include student engagement surveys (comparable with college-wide and national scores on the CCSSE) and course completion, course pass, and next-semester retention rates (comparable with non-ePortfolio sections of the same courses, where available). This data has proven invaluable for performing formative assessment, consolidating support from institutional stakeholders, and attracting external funding.
4. To explore social pedagogies using ePortfolio
Building on participation in the AAC&U/Carnegie Foundation’s national Integrative Learning Project, LaGuardia’s second Title V-funded project infused ePortfolio into capstone and other key second-year courses and deepened our focus on social pedagogies and the connective potential of ePortfolio. Faculty participated in professional development aimed at using ePortfolio as a vehicle for integrative learning in the classroom and for helping students to make deeper, more meaningful connections in their educations. On a larger scale, the college formalized its longstanding leadership in the ePortfolio field by founding the Making Connections National Resource Center on Inquiry, Reflection and Integrative Education; running a three year program (2008-10) to support 40 colleges in the NYC region in launching and advancing their own campus ePortfolio programs; initiating the Making Transfer Connections program to use ePortfolio facilitate transfer between senior and community colleges within the CUNY system; and leading the now-25 campus Connect to Learning network. Each of these ventures signifies in a different way the new reality that learning through ePortfolio is not a solitary exercise, but a profoundly social one.
Connections to Core Strategies:
Advancing Through Professional Development
To go from the about 800 ePortfolios to over 80,000 in 10 years, faculty had to have played a fundamental role in LaGuardia’s ePortfolio initiative. At the heart of this expansion are the professional development activities afforded to faculty and staff through LaGuardia’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). LaGuardia’s CTL offers a wide range of year-long seminars for faculty and staff to explore ePortfolio-related pedagogy and support student success. Participation in these seminars enhances faculty buy-in for a broad change. A few seminars offered by CTL are described below to illustrate the role of professional development in deepening our ePortfolio initiative.
Connected Learning: In this year-long seminar faculty learn about the pedagogical applications of ePortfolio by doing: the seminar invites faculty to construct their own professional ePortfolios for documenting and reflecting upon their ongoing course revision, modeling a classroom environment in which everyone shares with and learns from one another. Specific areas of emphasis include using ePortfolio to help students overcome fragmentation in their learning; actively and meaningfully connect with faculty, peers, and external audiences; integrate their diverse learning experiences, both inside and outside of the classroom; and, envision and plan their educational futures, including graduation and transfer.
Cultivating and Expanding Hybrid/Online Teaching and Learning: This is a year-long professional development seminar in which faculty actively explore the distinction between hybrid/online teaching and teaching in a traditional classroom. Participants are asked to contemplate on what logistical and pedagogical issues are needed to consider when transitioning from a face-to-face to a hybrid (partially online, partially face-to-face) or fully online environment, which tools can help engage students in their learning, how might ePortfolio fit into an online course, and how will the assessment of student learning be different.
New Faculty Colloquium: This is a year-long professional development seminar for new hired faculty. The colloquium focuses on issues of pedagogy and classroom practice, emphasizes sharing among instructors and student-centered classrooms, introduces new faculty to a range of teaching issues and helps them as they develop effective strategies for LaGuardia classrooms. The colloquium also provides new faculty with an overview of LaGuardia's key faculty development programs, such as teaching-with-technology initiatives.
In the aforementioned year-long seminars, a seminar ePortfolio is created that houses seminar-related material and a space for participants to post reflections and individual work. Participants also create their own ePortfolios as well. Past seminar participants and faculty/staff actively engaged in using ePortfolio in their classes are invited to present to current participants on how ePortfolio has impacted their current pedagogy. This year, the Cultivating and Expanding Hybrid/Online Teaching and Learning Seminar is deepening its exploration on how to use ePortfolio from a more pedagogical point-of-view. The role of ePortfolio is being integrated more systematically in The New Faculty Colloquium. For example, at the full day orientation institute, new faculty were introduced to the technical aspects of ePortfolio, started to create their own personal ePortfolios with a focus on tenure and promotion, and viewed student ePortfolios to get a more enriched view of LaGuardia’s student body. Throughout the New Faculty Colloquium this year faculty will explore ePortfolio in connection with the pedagogical principles mentioned in How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching.
Connecting to Programs
One major outcome from LaGuardia’s rich offerings of professional development activities and seminars is the programmatic use of ePortfolios. The seminars involve individual faculty from a various departments developing ePortfolio as a pedagogy that catalyzes student reflection and integrative learning. This burgeons into multiple faculty using ePortfolio in a department and eventually a department utilizing ePortfolios in programs and in the periodic program review process. To help facilitate both faculty buy-in and initiate implementation programmatic use of ePortfolios, the CTL offers ePortfolio mini-grants, small grants to faculty to integrate ePortfolio across their curricula. These grants can be used to support program or department–led efforts, including faculty development and curriculum integration processes, addressing the programmatic implementation of LaGuardia’s ePortfolio system.
Several programs now utilized program specific ePortfolio templates and require all students in that program to create ePortfolios. Please click on the following program names to view the ePortfolio templates utilized by that program- education, physical therapist assistant, and nursing. In addition, another growing trend at LaGuardia is the use for ePortfolios student organizations and there is even a student club ePortfolio template. Even the Anatomy and Physiology Study Hall has created an ePortfolio as an educational resource for students.
LaGuardia has strong professional development program for faculty and staff as evidenced by these select examples. Through this professional development, faculty deepen their understanding of not only what an ePortfolio is but its pedagogical impact. The strength of LaGuardia’s professional development stems from the hands-on approach of learning by doing. If faculty are comfortable with both the pedagogy and the technology driving the pedagogy then they will relay that to their students and colleagues, and ultimately build that crucial buy-in for a broad change. From our advancement through professional development has risen the connection to programs. Both strategies have synergistically impacted LaGuardia’s ePortfolio initiative and helped establish ePortfolio as a network of connections as well as a catalyst for change on our campus.
Our Next Steps:
Though there certainly exists a firmly established ePortfolio culture at LaGuardia, we will continue to expand and develop in order to scale up (even) more broadly across the college. Our key next steps include integrating eP into several burgeoning programs campus-wide, to ensure that ePortfolio practices are most meaningfully incorporated into new architectures as they are being built, rather than coming to exist as "add-ons" after the programs are piloted. We anticipate eP to continue operating as a "connector" and a "catalyst," and trust that the current strength of our eP initiative will do well to support/enhance several of LaGCC's new endeavors and ensure their success. These include expanding our catalogue of hybrid/online course offerings, enriching our faculty development seminars with an increased focus on social pedagogy, LaGuardia’s intense college-wide concentration on improving advisement practices, redesigning a freshman year experience (FYE) for entering students, and moving toward a portfolio-based holistic assessment process.
Our plans best align with items 3, 5, and 6 in “Ten Core Strategies for Scaling Up”:
- advancing through professional development
- connecting to high-impact practices, and
- building strategic connections to outcomes assessment.
Advancing through professional development: While many face-to-face courses at LaGCC are “web-enhanced” with eP, ePortfolio pedagogy will play a significant role with the Cultivating and Expanding Hybrid/Online Teaching and Learning faculty development seminar; participants will build seminar ePs, read eP-specific SoTL, and be challenged with designing a hybrid or online eP-enhanced course. As the college seeks to enhance students’ experiences online, the 2012 - 13 cohort of the Art of Advising faculty development seminar will consider how digital portfolios may be best exploited for advising and transfer planning. In both our Connected Learning: ePortfolio & Integrative Pedagogy seminar and in our New Faculty Colloquium, there will be a concentrated focus on building professional faculty ePortfolios—in addition to facilitating student-to-student connections with peer exchanges through eP. Our aim is to better encourage student-to-faculty and faculty-to-student connections with faculty ePs also serving as models for student portfolios, offering pragmatic evidence of the practice of lifelong learning.
Connecting to high impact practices: A new team of planners for a revised FYE are dedicated to helping faculty motivate students to create ePs at the beginning of their LaGCC experience, helping to repair a problem of sometimes sporadically populated or capstone-only student portfolios.
Building strategic connections to outcomes assessment: As the college plans for its next “benchmark assessment” readings, we plan to test rubrics developed by faculty in our CTL seminars as we experiment with a plan to move toward a practice of holistic evaluation of students using ePortfolios.
A large part of our plan targets faculty development, an area where we have had a great deal of success in the past. LaG's assessment methods are evolving and our FYE practices are new, so we expect connections between eP and these efforts to be mutually beneficial. One additional challenge we are experiencing is that our eP platform struggles to keep pace with the many new creative approaches to ePortfolio and integrative learning initiated by faculty, staff, and students. Our campus will continue working with Digication to pilot new web 2.0 features oriented toward social pedagogy.
7. Wesley Pitts
Hi LaGuardia, Thanks for sharing such an excellent scale-up story. It is certainly an exemplar in the context of ePortfolio implementation in higher education. I enjoyed reading about the notion that building a successful ePortfolio culture at LaGuardia must necessarily be understood and realize in term of process. It is not surprising that your Middle States evaluation outcome noted the LaGuardia’s ePortfolio culture as exemplary.
Below I share some thoughts on the your scale-up write-up.
1) In the Current Status section you outlined the key role and systematic support The Center for Teaching and Learning (CLT) provides to LaG’s eP initiative. It was also noted that the ePortfolio Leadership team provides a space for key collaborative efforts between faculty and staff. How does the CLT interact with ePortfolio Leadership team? Is it possible to invite students to participate on the leadership team?
2) Sponsoring the Periodic Program Review process is a very good idea. It gives important support on a departmental level. In identifying the challenge of “assessing the ePortfolio in totality,” I wonder if the Periodic Program Review process would be a good mechanism to tap in order to help meet this challenge. I take the assessing the ePortfolio in totality to mean investigating students’ ePortfolio experiences and their ePortfolio at the point of graduation. Is this correct? Perhaps additional explanation of this challenge is warranted.
3) In reading your Connection to the Core Strategies, I understood the section as connecting to the core strategy of advancing through professional development. Perhaps this should be placed in the title of the section or the intro paragraph to explicitly signal to the reader that this was the strategy being addressed.
4) Two key questions about your scale up story are: A) How has ePortfolio implementation affected the governance structure of the college?; B) Is the ePortfolio initiative in the college’s strategic plan? If yes, at what point was it incorporated?
5) Thinking about Randy essay on scaling –up- do you see some movement and shape to the type of “ Design Core of the Recentered Curriculum” that Randy describes. I think it is important to note that the recentered curriculum will materialize in unique ways across various college campuses.
10/02/12, 04:16 am
6. Anna Kruse
Hi LaGuardia,
Thanks for your comments on our Georgetown portfolio-- and for the warm welcome into the C2L community!
It sounds like your ePortfolio Leadership Team is a great asset in enriching practices and building buy-in around ePortfolios. Do all of the 6+ full time staff that you mention in the "numbers section" serve on the team? And do those individuals have to toggle other project responsibilities, or can they devote their time exclusively to ePortfolio issues?
You mention that ePortfolio mini-grants are available to faculty to integrate ePortfolios into their courses. Building on Theresa's comment, one thing that we sometimes encounter here at Georgetown are students with multiple course-based portfolios that are not connected to each other and were developed as assignments in different disciplines over different semesters; have you run into this problem as well with your course-based portfolio implementations, and if so, how do you address it? While we encourage more intentional and longitudinal use of ePortfolios, we still honor all ePortfolio setup requests from faculty, so we often find ourselves in this scenario.
Thanks!
Anna
10/01/12, 04:07 pm
5. Theresa Schlafly
It's amazing to see how integral the ePortfolio has become to LaGuardia's programs. I think it's especially interesting how you incorporate ePortfolios into faculty development programs to allow faculty to "learn by doing." I also really like the studio model of peer mentoring.
I am curious whether you ever encounter "ePortfolio fatigue" among students or faculty. Do students often create multiple ePortfolios in different programs or classes? As Alison asked in her comment, are there inconsistencies with implementation that could be frustrating to students who are working with ePortfolios in multiple contexts? How do you address resistance from faculty who are reluctant to incorporate ePortfolios in their courses?
Finally, I'm interested in how you are incorporating social pedagogies into the ePortfolios. Do students comment on one another's work? Is there a particular model for how these interactions are structured and evaluated?
10/01/12, 03:47 pm
4. Bret Eynon
Dear LaGuardia Friends,
Thanks so much for doing such a good job in putting together this Scaling Up Story. You’ve done a great job of compressing a long and complex story to make it more concise and manageable. It’s a good read and you’ve still managed fit a lot of useful information into it. That was no easy task.
It’s fascinating to me to see how you’ve interpreted this history, in which I’ve been so involved. I can’t pretend to give you comments from an objective perspective. I hope colleagues from other campuses can help you think about what an outside reader needs to know about LaGuardia. But I can give some feedback that I hope will be helpful as well. Here are some thoughts that I hope will be helpful as you do your revisions:
A) In the opening section, on Current Status, I particularly missed two key items that are both crucial to the institutionalization/scaling up story. First is the connection with specific academic programs, particularly the College’s professional majors (Business, Accounting, Nursing, Engineering, Education, Physical Therapy Assistant, etc.) These programs are in many ways the strongholds of ePortfolio implementation at LaGuardia. Most of these programs have thoroughly integrated ePortfolio into their curricula, making it a recurring element in everyday teaching and learning. There is probably more to say about this (how and why it developed this way, for example) than you can fit into this Story, but it should at least be mentioned.
Second is the support for ePortfolio from LaGuardia’s academic administration. Dean (now Provost) Arcario was the first person at LaGuardia to bring up the idea of portfolios, and his support opened countless doors. VP Bihn provided critical encouragement and even more critical support in the form of staff lines, President Mellow has consistently articulated the value of ePortfolio to the students and the College. I say these things not In the sense of giving public credit (which isn’t a bad thing to do, of course), but more in an analytical sense – if we look at other campus Stories, winning upper level support is often a key step yet to be accomplished. The degree of buy-in and support for ePortfolio demonstrated by LaGuardia’s upper level administrators has been outstanding, and it is one factor in explaining the sustained vibrancy of our initiative.
B) I was delighted to see you make reference to ePortfolio as a connector and a catalyst for change. But I think you can do more with these concepts. I would strongly encourage you to re-read Randy’s essay
c2l.digication.com/... and to explore ways that these concepts can be used as analytical frameworks. For example, you mention the focus on building connections – it would be helpful to know more about what this actually means in practice. And the concept of ePortfolio as catalyst for change could serve as an explanatory framework for the ways LaGuardia is shifting in all sorts of ways, including a heightened focus on integrative learning (alignment, any one?). You might think about this section of Randy’s essay, which I’ve highlighted elsewhere:
“What does it mean to be a catalyst for change? What’s the vision of change that is prefigured by ePortfolio? There are at least three layers to this change that have been implied in the discussion so far:
“1) The shift to a student-organized view of learning, bridging curriculum and co-curriculum, where learners pull from knowledge resources and offerings to construct an increasingly customized educational experience, that is both professionally productive and personally meaningful.
“ 2) The development of an institutional conversation on student learning, moving towards a learning-centered culture and structure.
“3) A shift in decision-making, investment, and allocation of resources and energy that optimizes the institution to be responsive to high-impact learning.
“These all bear on scaling strategies for ePortfolio initiatives. For example, in the sphere of professional development, ePortfolio invites faculty and staff, to understand the student learning space differently—while at the same time anchoring ePortfolio assignments and reflection practices in their course goals. Yet, ePortfolio by nature provides faculty a way to think beyond their courses, both to connect course goals to programs goals, and potentially to connect course content to student experiences.”
I think these concepts can be useful in thinking about our Current Status, our Developmental History, and our Next Steps. The more you think about these concepts in your revision, the more valuable your Story will be to the overall project.
C) On a smaller scale, I think the USE of outcomes data gets a bit lost in this telling. The fact that we have been gathering outcomes data for 7-8 years, and that the data shows all sorts of gains is interesting enough in and of itself. But even more important is the ways that this data has been critical in solidifying the institutional/administrative support alluded to above. This is said in the developmental history, but undercut somewhat by the discussion of data in the Current Status section. Better coordination between these two sections (and a connection to the Core Strategies) might help clarify how critical the USE of the data has been.
D) A minor note, but worth mentioning, since the number is used several times – as of Fall 2011 we had a total of approx. 68,000 portfolios. My guess is that we’re now over 80,000.
E) In the Core Strategies area, I do think the professional development element of our work has been key. It might be worth a short paragraph or two discussing, in brief, some of the other Strategies (Connecting to Programs, Use of Data, Connecting to Assessment). Or, alternatively, since some of these issues are discussed elsewhere, you might reference the Core Strategies in those sections, not only in Section C. The more explicitly you hook your story to the Scaling Up concepts and categories, the stronger it will be.
F) In the Next Steps section, I was delighted to see you integrate the Core Strategies. It might also be interesting to think about how the concepts of connector and catalyst are shaping – or could/should shape – our work, going forward.
I hope these notes are in some way helpful to you. You have a challenging task in seeking to figure out and tell this story. But I feel confident that grappling with this history can help all of you as you take increasingly significant leadership roles of this initiative and other related campus efforts. Hopefully, the revision phase will provide an opportunity to synthesize the four sections and to think about how they relate, and to address the key Scaling Up concepts more deeply and directly. I will be looking forward to seeing your revised and polished story.
Best to all,
Bret
09/30/12, 02:45 pm
3. Gillian Hannum
Dear LaGuardia Friends:
What a rich posting! I especially like the way you articulate your emphasis as being focused on using ePortfolio as a catalyst (for change in teaching and learning) and a connection (integrative learning). Your faculty development model is comprehensive, and your use of students in support functions also seems to be well developed. We have piloted aspects of both (departmental mini grants and adding student mentor training in ePortfolio) recently as part of our C2L stragegy.
I would like to hear a bit more about your thinking in terms of evaluating ePortfolios themselves, and collecting data on them. I assume this would be a rubric-driven evaluation. I'm also very interested to see how you move forward linking eP even more closely with your FYE, something we, too, are working on at Manhattanville.
Your year-long new faculty colloquium also sounds so valuable. Only in recent years have we had an Orientation for new faculty. Can you share more detail about how the colloquium works and the role of ePortfolio within it?
Again, thank you for your leadership. We have certainly benefitted as a result!
09/29/12, 12:08 pm
2. Jim Frank
Hello LaGCC,
It has been a wonderful learning opportunity to be part of your process of growth as part of the Making Connections program and now the C2L project. A few items (of many) I think are important in your story:
(1) how LaGCC is using eP in the New Faculty Colloquium starting NF off on their Tenure and Promotion process and allowing them to get that enriched view of your student body. This is quite wonderful!!
(2) the recognition and implementation of students' engagement with new media technology as an emphasis for your work. I look forward to learning more about this and how it is supported.
Jim Frank
09/28/12, 10:42 pm
1. Alison Carson
Dear LaGCCers, thanks so much for sharing your story. As you suggest, to tell the whole story may be too much given the scope of your development. As both a pioneer and exemplar of ePortfolio implementation, it is particularly interesting to hear you describe the challenges you face as well as your anticipated next steps. One question I have for you is with regard to the large scale of your program. When so many students are using ePortfolio (10,000+), and so many faculty, how do you maintain or even oversee the quality of ePortfolio implementation in the classroom. We are on a much smaller scale and I think we are already facing this issue. I would imagine that the focus on the FYE might be one way to deal with this issue. Similarly, when you are using eP for both assessment and learning, do you find these two focuses can potentially send mixed messages? I understand that one can be closely related to the other, but is there room for people seeing these as priorities that are potentially contradictory? As a leader in the field, we are all watching to see what you do next...no pressure!
09/28/12, 06:41 pm