The Interfolio Blog

Online portfolios, or ePortfolios, have long been discussed as options for providing institutions and professors with a better way to assess student achievement. Many argue that despite a lack of standardized options, these cumulative and shared examples of a student's work allow great insight into academic achievement and progress over the course of a term.

In an interesting continuance of this line of thought, an article in Campus Technology by Trent Batson discusses a few interesting observations and concludes that widespread adoption of online portfolios could significantly improve measurement of a student's learning, not just because those who measure would have better access to examples, but because the student's voice in providing feedback on how much they feel they've learned could and should play a larger role in overall assessment.

Batson argues that a student's role in giving feedback as to how much they have learned is akin to the patient telling a doctor how he is feeling: it is vital to overall assessment that the voice of the "patient" be heard. This should not be accomplished through an arbitrary survey at the end of each semester, but rather through continued and close reflection on the student's own work over the course of their time in higher education. Online portfolios play a significant role in allowing a student to not only gather work throughout their academic lives, but to also look back on progress made and reflect on what they have accomplished and where there might still be holes.

Online portfolios then have important dual use. On the one hand, they are important tools for the institution, while on the other, they can have significant benefit for the individual student. The challenge, Batson notes, is to find an online portfolio tool that can play both these roles simultaneously. Regardless, we are likely to see significantly increased adoption of online portfolios as administrators, educators and students alike begin to see the benefits of reflection for the measurement of academic success.