The E-Portfolio Forum: Deepening High Impact Learning Sessions
January 29, 2011 - San Francisco, CA
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Compared to What? Accountability, Improvement, ePortfolios, and Honoring the Learner and the Learning

Presenter(s):  Gary Brown, Director, Office of Assessment and Innovation, Washington State University.

Description: A critical first step for individuals and institutions who are designing an ePortfolio project is to identify both internal and external project stakeholders, such as students, faculty, technology support staff, and even prospective employers and alumni. Understanding how these different constituent groups can contribute to and also benefit from ePortfolios can inform the design of ePortfolios and how they are scaled and integrated into the culture of the institution. This session uses case studies and prompting questions to help participants identify the needs of the ePortfolio stakeholders on their own campus and brainstorm strategies to address them.

[The following video is presented in 15 minute increments.]

Part 1 of 4

Part 2 of 4

Part 3 of 4

Part 4 of 4

Downloadable Presentation Files:
PDF:  Compared to What? Accountability, Improvement, ePortfolios, and Honoring the Learner and the Learning

Works Cited: 
Ewell: Assessment, Accountability, and Improvement: Revisiting the Tension
Batson: ePortfolios, Finally!

Gary's post-Forum reflection:

I had the honor and pleasure of delivering the closing plenary at the AAC&U ePortfolio day. In my remarks I underscored what I felt then and feel even more so today -- the great urgency of the work the ePortfolio community has undertaken. The work coupled with projects like AAC&U’s VALUE initiative represents a critical opportunity to respond productively to reasonable expectations for accountability in ways that counter a more problematic press for accountability shaped by an ethos of competition and standardization. The irony embedded in the two-prongs of that press aside, the trends threaten to extinguish student agency as profoundly as they devalue faculty expertise and autonomy. Standardized assessment is bad assessment done for all the wrong reasons.

In the epilogue of my presentation, however, I shared how efforts allied with ePortfolio community work that I led at WSU backfired. My unit was dismantled and refocused mostly on supporting online student evaluations of teaching. I was “reassigned.” (At this writing it still remains to be determined where I might wind up.)

Upon reflection, and I have done much, it is hard to discount two realities...

First, assessment to improve students’ learning necessarily reveals aspects of practice that merit improvement.

Second, in these nervous times such revelations may very well be a dangerous exposure.

One of our colleagues cornered me after my presentation in San Francisco. She said she was sorry about what transpired at WSU, but she also shared some discomfort with the nature of our assessment work. Her objection was clear. She couldn’t possibly work any harder. Ever larger classes, more press for research and service plus the expectation that she add to her instruction new technologies—it is simply not possible for an individual to do more. The last thing she needed was some kind of assessment added to her load that would likely suggest to her administration that her work was not good enough.

Certainly her impressions are representative of an unfortunate and all too common understanding of assessment.

It is ironic of course that the misperception of the motives and utility of our work at WSU may result in the realization of our worst nightmare: the relinquishing of responsibility for improvement to test makers and politicians outside of the academy.

In that exchange I recognized that I had perhaps failed to communicate the most important point—ePortfolios as well as outcomes assessment initiatives will fail if we approach them as more work, if they are perceived and implemented as a sterile assessment independent from good teaching and learning practice. Outcomes assessment and ePortfolios, which might well be complementary but must not be conflated, each make manifest a potentially different kind of work. In concert they must be implemented in ways that point a clear path to educational reintegration and renewal. They need to be understood as a way of embedding and thereby reacquainting assessment with teaching and learning, and they need to be used as a way to lighten our loads by freeing ourselves from the “Atlas Complex” that characterizes what we and the general public often understand as the meritorious approach of the “good teacher.” We need our superstars, after all. Our idols.

It is regrettable that for most of us teaching has been increasingly influenced by similar nonsense. It has, for most, been an endeavor that is largely solitary, and assessment—whether it is grading student performance or students’ evaluations of our teaching—has been mostly summative. And even as pressures are ratcheting up for each of us to do more to justify our individual performance, we are also now asked, as part of that justification, to respond to the question, “Do ePortfolios work?”

There is a very simple answer to that question. It depends. It depends upon our purpose, integrity, and faith in students to shape, direct, and reflect upon their own learning. It depends upon our ability to support and impart our confidence in them, not just as individual faculty or mentors, but in collaboration with colleagues in our programs and community. It depends upon courageous leadership who will stand up in this time of heightened fears and assure us that introducing innovative pedagogies and making evidence-based improvements in students’ learning experiences is not only safe, it is our public duty and collective responsibility.

There are many reasons to be fearful that the vision is not one that might be achieved. Certainly my story is testament to the potential pitfalls. But even in this current flux of budget cuts and deep and stark reorganization I remain hopeful. There is much more at stake than my job. The budding ePortfolio movement can be a critical counter to a spreading ethos of pointless competition, vacuous comparisons and insipid rankings that of late have seized the culture and made many of our colleagues anxious, mean and small. At a time when the entire majesty of the public good is under attack, the ePortfolio and its practitioners represent a potential and critical alternative future that can be cooperative, collaborative, communal and optimistic.

From my current vantage, somewhat adrift in the academy, that alternative is not an elective.

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