Documentation:Eportfolio Basics/Uses and Benefits

Uses and Benefits

Why would I choose to use e-Portfolios?

• demonstrate to potential employers, graduate schools, or others that you have the skills you claim to have.

Who is using an e-Portfolio?

• Entrepreneurs, photographers, designers, urban planners, contractors, teachers, recent graduates, business owners, future employers and students documenting their learning

Academic Uses:

• Learning or Development
• Assessment
• Employment
• Retention, Promotion or Tenure
• Certification, Accreditation

Benefits of the e-Portfolio Process (Liz Hamp-Lyons & William Condon 1998, Cambridge 2001) :

• can feature multiple examples of work: such as drafts of writing over the course of a semester or quarter. Looking at development over time you get a more accurate representation of what students have learned.
• can be context rich: instead of just seeing the final product or the grade, including the course syllabus, assignment and grading criteria will make the assessment process more accessible. The reader of the portfolio can see the context for learning and how change has happened over time.
• can offer opportunities for selection and self-assessment: the portfolio can represent evidence of what the student believes to be quality work. Lee Shulman, former President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has talked about the teaching portfolio as a theoretical act. That the act of selecting and determining what is 'portfolio worthy' is an act of theory, an act of personal growth and reflection.
• can offer a look at development over time: using the technology to visualize what you have learned in ways that you could not have seen if your examples were simply in a stack of papers