AACU, February, 2012

We are just back from a great time in New Orleans learning more about General Education and Assessment: New Contexts, New Cultures February 23-25, 2012 where we presented:

The Promise of e-Portfolios: Creating a New Culture of Assessment
Workshop co-facilitators will share strategies for starting and sustaining an undergraduate e-portfolio program that collects evidence of student learning. Given the chronically poor outcomes of many of today’s college students, e-portfolios can operate as a high-impact practice providing students and educators with a tool to improve academic success both within and across two-and four-year institutions. Co-facilitators and participants will discuss key steps to mapping student work to learning outcomes at course, program, and institutional levels.
Ruth Cox, ePortfolio Faculty Liaison, Faculty/Health Education, San Francisco State University; and Savita Malik, Curriculum Director and Instructor Metro Academies, City College of San Francisco

Metro Academies Chosen for Compass II Project

Great News to Wrap Up the Year!

The Metro Academies project was chosen as one of the new Compass II projects in the CSU. We included a section about our work with ePortfolios in Metro in the proposal, and plan to continue to leverage our existing work with this CSU support.  Metro Academies now has an ePortfolio reference site for students in the program. Here is a link to a sample student site in Metro.

Along with our Connect to Learning grant, Metro has become an important model project. Thanks to all of you for your on-going great work with ePortfolios this semester! 

Happy Holidays and New Year to all of our colleagues around the country.  

Ruth Cox and the SF State Team

AAEEBL ePortfolio World Summit 2011 Presentation

On July 26th, we will be presenting "Growing an ePorticulture: (Trans)planting, Sustaining, and Harvesting Evidence of Deep Learning within the Metro Academies Program."
Ruth Cox, Kevin Kelly, San Francisco State University

This interactive workshop will share strategies for planting an ePortfolio program, sustaining it, and harvesting evidence of student learning, with focus on the Metro Academies of Health a community college and university partnership program and its model of utilizing ePortfolios and high-impact practices.

Workshop themes with supporting case stories from the Metro program will include: a) successful "planting / transplanting" tips with strategies for getting started; b) maintaining ePortfolio initiatives, training and support models, and "mapping" and "tagging" artifacts to learning outcomes at different levels; and c) harvesting student work and strategies for the use of portfolios in program reviews.

Great news!
SF State has learned that we will be a part of a new cohort with the
"Connect to Learning: ePortfolio, Engagement, and Student Success," project. Funded by FIPSE, the US Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, Connect to Learning will bring together ePortfolio leadership teams from campuses nationwide to explore and strengthen best practices in ePortfolio pedagogy.

Here is our Connect to Learning ePortfolio tracking our work on this project:

https://c2l.digication.com/sfsu_project_portfolio/profile//

We are excited to be joining with 21 other campuses:

Boston University
U. of Delaware
Hunter College, CUNY
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
Johnson & Wales University
LaGuardia Community College, CUNY
Lehman College, CUNY
Long Island University
Manhattanville College
Northwest Connecticut Community College
Norwalk Community College
Pace University
Queensborough Community College, CUNY
Rutgers University
Salt Lake Community College
San Francisco State University
School of Professional Studies, CUNY
St. John’s University
SUNY Empire State
Three Rivers Community College
Tunxis Community College
Virginia Tech

Building a nationwide network that links community colleges, private
colleges and research universities, the Connect to Learning project will
kick off at a January national ePortfolio Forum, held in San Francisco
and sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Over the next three years, participating campuses will use a structured
matrix model of ePortfolio development to plan and implement
campus-based innovations and evaluate the impact of ePortfolio
implementation on student learning. Over the course of the three year
project, Connect to Learning will advance the practice of hundreds of
faculty, benefit 20-25,000 students, and generate evidence-based
national models of ePortfolio implementation.

SF State is gearing up for the AACU conference to be held in our home city in January. We are offering two presentations that relate to our ePortfolio adventure. 

Friday, January 28, 10:30-11:45 am
E-Portfolios for Global Learning: Connecting High Impact Practices, General Education and Authentic Assessment within the Metro Academies Program
Enabling students to be successful citizens and create sustainable change in an increasingly global society rests on relevant curriculum, integrated instruction and a meaningful interaction with technology. This session is designed for administrators and faculty to develop a deeper understanding of how ePortfolios can be used in their institutions as well as the Metro Academies (partnerships of 2-year and 4-year institutions) model of utilizing high-impact practices to engage and challenge their students.

Kevin Kelly, Director of Online Teaching and Learning, Ruth Cox, ePortfolio Faculty Liaison, Academic Technology, Savita Malik, Curriculum Director, Metro Academies, and Mary Beth Love, Department Chair, Professor, Department of Health Education – all of San Francisco State University
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Saturday, Jan 29 2:00–3:30 pm Concurrent Sessions

Best Practices
Growing an ePorticulture: Steps to Planting and Sustaining Deeper Learning and Assessment with ePortfolios
This interactive workshop will share practical strategies for starting, sustaining, and harvesting evidence of student learning through an ePortfolio program. Drawing on six years of experience working “from the ground up” at San Francisco State University, we will share examples and resources from our ePortfolio projects. Themes with supporting case stories will include: Successful "planting" tips with getting-started steps and examples of discipline specific portfolios; maintaining and growing, with examples of "mapping" and "tagging" student work to learning outcomes at course, program, and institutional levels; harvesting student work through Capstone courses and strategies for the use of portfolios in program reviews.

Ruth Cox, ePortfolio Departmental / Faculty Liaison, Lecturer in Health Education, Kevin Kelly, Manager, Online Teaching & Learning / Media Distribution & Support, Tanya Augsburg, Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies, Angie Portacio, Academic Technology Consultant, Maggie Beers, Director, Academic Technology – all of San Francisco State University

AAC & U Annual Meeting Features ePortfolio Innovation

• Just back from Washington, DC where the AAC & U annual conference offered a day-long symposium: The Search for VALUE: Innovation, Economic Uncertainty and ePortfolio Assessment.

We were heartened to participate and see how much new interest there is in the use of ePortfolios across the country.

In our work on the VALUE (Valid Assessment in Undergraduate Education) project, we've worked to create a set of rubrics that will be useful in evaluating portfolios and the work within them. Led by Terrel Phodes and Wende Morgaine, the VALUE project (and 15 rubric/scoring guides) I believe will prove to be a powerful driver in the continued development of using ePortfolios for curricular, co-curricular, and institution-wide outcomes.

Two VALUE publications worth checking out are:

• Assessing Outcomes & Improving Achievement: Tips and Tools for Using Rubrics
• Electronic Portfolios and Student Success: Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Learning

Mapping

This diagram (created by Kevin Kelly at SF State, click to enlarge) shows how ePortfolios can be used to map individual student work to the overarching campus goals. Campuses can build on the process from the top down during program review cycles by helping departments align their program objectives with university strategic plan goals and/or graduation requirements. These graduation requirements often include General Education (GE) content objectives, campus student learning outcomes (SLOs), or both. At the same time, campuses can promote the use of ePortfolios to assess students' achievement of program objectives. Academic technology units and faculty development centers can work with departments and instructors from the bottom up to map course objectives to program objectives. Next, staff and faculty-in-residence can work with individual instructors to identify student projects that would generate appropriate artifacts to demonstrate student competencies. When these two approaches meet in the middle, it is then possible to show the connections between student work and institutional goals.

We will be sharing more ideas about how to use ePortfolios at the course, dept.,and campus levels...