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In this document, we provide recommendations and resources on creating and implementing ePortfolios—an —into your courses and degree programs.

What are ePortfolios? 

ePortfolios are a collection of student-created work for varied reasons:

• Learning
• Assessment
• Showcase of work/abilities
• Inside a course or across courses/experiences
• For self, teacher, program, or external (potential employers)

Effective ePortfolios are both a product (the artifact created) and a process (the reflecting and revising that happens to create the artifact). ePortfolios guide students toward making valuable connections between courses, assignments, co-curricular activities, and extracurricular activities. Students can create them using pre-made or adjusted templates online via various platforms like Google Sites, Wix, Weebly, etc. 

For course ePortfolios, students gather, revise, and reflect on work completed during the course and the portfolio constitutes a major portion of the grade at the end of the course. The teacher is the audience for this ePortfolio, and is assigned a grade.

For program ePortfolios, students gather, revise, and reflect on work completed across a program (across the ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú Plan, across their major) and then finalize a portfolio at the end of their time in the program. This portfolio is not necessarily tied to a grade or any one course; audiences can be varied (internal or external).

Overall, ePortfolios provide students with an opportunity to showcase what they have learned throughout a particular course or throughout a degree program. These ePortfolios should engage students in meaningful reflection where they can make explicit the sometimes implicit connections they see and experience.

Recommendations to keep in mind while designing, scaffolding, and assigning ePortfolios in your courses or degree programs:

1. Identify the audience for your ePortfolio assignment. Is this going to be a course ePortfolio with just you (the teacher) as the audience? Or is the audience going to be a more external audience, such as potential employers or other members of your department for program assessment? Identifying your assignment’s target audience is important for fleshing out the details of the assignment.
2. Decide the organization of your ePortfolio assignment. There are various ways you can organize your ePortfolio assignment, and different required components you can include. For example, in a course ePortfolio, you could have the ePortfolio organized so that students create a welcoming “about me” section, upload and provide summaries for two or three major projects in your course, write a reflection citing each assignment about how they’ve grown as an educator, writer, communicator, scientist, etc, and then include a resume (). For a program ePortfolio, you might have students create a welcoming “about me” section, compile a gallery of assignments across key courses in the program, and provide a reflective synthesis relevant to their career goals after graduation. Providing students with required (or even recommended) sections can help guide them toward completing the ePortfolio, and help you plan how you will support them through each part during the course/program.
3. Explain the purpose and benefit of ePortfolios. Students may not have completed an ePortfolio assignment before, so it’s important to be clear with students about what these are, why you are using them, how they can help students develop deeper learning, and how much they will count for overall course grade/count for a degree requirement.
4. Scaffold the ePortfolio assignment and build in time for students to return to it throughout the semester. ePortfolios work best when students have time to revisit and revise earlier work for the portfolio, and when they are prompted to think about it ahead of time in smaller steps or chunks. This could be as simple as having students freewrite for five minutes about their assignments after turning them in. You can remind them that they will return to this assignment later in the course and prompt them to think about the challenges they overcame completing the assignment. For program ePortfolios, you can include a “check point” throughout the program where students write a reflection about their time in the program thus far and identify ways they have grown and changed throughout. Little activities like this prime students toward the ePortfolio and build a practice of regular reflection that is key to completing successful ePortfolios. 
5. Explore the different platforms available for students to build ePortfolios (and design one yourself!). There are a variety of platforms available for creating ePortfolios, such as  Google Sites, Wix, Weebly, and more. Each one has its own affordances and constraints, and some might be better for different students and audiences. It can be helpful to plan a class day where students can play around with the different platforms and decide which one they should use. It might also be helpful to include some guidelines or guided activities for them during this time. You can also create a sample ePortfolio to get a sense of how it works and what might be most important for your specific context.
6. Share examples of student ePortfolios with students and dissect them together. You can share some of the examples provided here on our list, as well as look up other examples online. It can be extremely helpful for students to see how these ePortfolios work and be able to describe and analyze the different features. Students could conduct a genre analysis of these ePortfolios, where they break off into four groups and each answer one of the). This could be a 20 minute classroom activity to start off the ePortfolio unit, or can be built into other lesson plans. 
7. Encourage students to share with each other, either with peer response or the Howe Writing Center/Career Center. Just as writing and learning are social, so too is the idea of an ePortfolio. These are artifacts that are meant to be read and engaged by others. To help students consider what their potential audiences might experience, build in a peer response session where students can offer feedback on each other’s drafts (view our “Engaging Students in Effective Peer Response” resource for more guidance on peer response). Additionally, encourage students to make an appointment at the Howe Writing Center to look over their ePortfolio, or at the Career Center to specifically look over resumes and other job materials. There is a network of people on campus to support the work of ePortfolios.
8. Create clear ePortfolio grading criteria (if in a course). Identify which elements you are looking for in the ePortfolio and how they will be graded. Better yet, have students co-create the criteria with you, and discuss in class which elements are most important (and why) and how they should be evaluated. You can create a sliding scale of how effective their approach in specific elements was, and have students help you write out what “very effective” and “adequate” looks like for ePortfolio visual design, meaningful reflection, etc.
9. Facilitate departmental assessment (if for a program). If you have students complete ePortfolios as part of a degree requirement, consider forming an assessment committee to read student ePortfolios and assess how well students are achieving the desired program outcomes. The results of this collective assessment can inform the program, course, and assignment redesign. 

National Resources on ePortfolios

• Cambridge, D., B. Cambridge and K. Yancey (2009). Sterling, VA: Stylus.
• Cambridge, D. (2010). . San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
• Chen, H.L. & Penny Light, T. (2010). . Washington: Association of American Colleges and Universities.
• Peet, M., Lonn, S., Gurin, P., Boyer, K. P., Matney, M., Marra, T., Simone Himbeault, T., & Daley, A. (2011). Fostering integrative knowledge through eportfolios. , 1(1), 11-31.
• Penny Light, T., Chen, H.L., & Ittelson, J.C. (2011). . Jossey-Bass.