Digital Portfolio Development for Faculty
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Hi, I’m Natalie Milman. I’m an associate professor of education technology and of curriculum and instruction in the graduate school of education in human development. I’ve been working on digital portfolios since 1998. So what’s a portfolio in the first place? Well, I think any of you who have developed art pieces or have taken an art class; you probably had a portfolio that you collected your items as an artist. And a digital portfolio is not entirely different from that, but one thing that does distinguish a digital portfolio is that there is typically a reflective component.
In a nutshell, a portfolio is a goal driven, organized collection of materials that demonstrate what you know in a particular area and how it’s organized, what goes into it as well as the different ways it can be presented depends on the individual, the focus of the individual’s audience as well as the purpose of the portfolio. A benefit of the portfolio process in and of itself is the reflective component. One question that I’ve been asked by many of my colleagues is “why would I as a professor create a digital portfolio?” and I believe one of the reasons is that you are able to share your craft with not only your colleagues; you can submit it as part of your tenure and promotion process, but I think also it’s wonderful to share what you’ve learned about yourself and about your craft and not only your content area but you’re teaching with your students also serves as a wonderful way to document and archive the various items you’ve amassed over the years as well as documenting work from your students and analyzing that and reflecting on that.
I found that in developing my own portfolio, it forces me to reflect on and review my work which I don’t believe as professors that that is something we do often enough. I think that one way to improve our teaching is to reflect on our work and a portfolio is a wonderful professional development means in which to do that.
Why would you consider having your students create a portfolio? I believe many of the same reasons that you might create one yourself, but also one major feature of the portfolio, using it as a method of assessment in a course is it allows you to examine a student’s progress both formatively and summatively and it also helps students to progress and evaluate themselves and reflect on their own learning in a formative way as well as a summative way on what they’ve learned. And I think even more importantly, to force them to think metacognitively about their learning, which research has shown that that definitely helps students learn.
Essentially, there are five different steps to the digital portfolio development process. There’s Planning, Considering the portfolio contents, designing the portfolio, evaluating the portfolio, and then publishing the portfolio. And blackboard assists in some of these steps, but the planning part essentially, what that involves is focusing who your audience is and then framing your portfolio. And to frame your portfolio, you can frame it around a question, professional standards, or a theme, like the roots of learning or question(How can I create a more constructive learning environment with my students?) and then standards. There might be professional standards in your field that you might want to use for framing your portfolio to demonstrate your competence and knowledge in those various standards. The next step is considering the portfolio contents. The third step is designing the portfolio, where you actually organize and then you produce that portfolio; you put all your pieces in and organize it in whatever way you like.
If you’re thinking of a digital web based portfolio, figure out what links you’re going to have and then how those links are going to link to other links and what pieces you might include within those various web pages of your entire website. The fourth step is to evaluate it. If it is for a 10 year promotion, then you would have a committee reviewing that. If it’s not for a 10 year promotion; it’s just for yourself or maybe it’s for a mini TnP review, you might want to have students even look at it, colleagues, significant others give you feedback on the look and feel and not only the aesthetics but more importantly the content of that portfolio, and evaluate it essentially. And finally, the last piece, which is really cyclical in that you just don’t go from planning to considering to designing to evaluating to publishing because you’re probably publishing as you’re designing and organizing, and certainly while after you evaluate, but the publishing aspect is making your portfolio public and letting others know it is available. It is a very recursive process. And always add and edit and revise your portfolio so it is just one piece of you as an individual, but it’s also a piece at a point in time even though you might have included pieces from the past and it’s a developmental thing.
One last thing I wanted to share is that there are essentially two portfolios, a working portfolio and a presentation portfolio. And the working portfolio you might consider Blackboard, you can have some space where you are just uploading various materials from your students, various materials that you have created from, let’s say your PowerPoint or a Podcast or a video or your Syllabi, whatever that is. You’re amassing this information, so that might be considered your working portfolio. But the presentation portfolio is what you would share with others and it’s more so a showcase portfolio. In many cases it is one’s best.
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