What is an ePortfolio?

An ePortfolio is a digital archive which represents student work over time through a broad range of artifacts. An ePortfolio might include submitted course papers and projects in a variety of formats, works-in-progress, independent research, reflections on assignments, learning goals, ideas for future scholarship, and links to relevant resources. An ePortfolio can function as a C.V. to share with prospective employers, a venue for sharing academic work with family and friends, a tool for inviting collaboration and feedback, or a private log of academic progress. A student might create an ePortfolio to collect work done over a certain period of time or to organize work along a particular theme – for example, an ePortfolio could represent a year abroad, the process of writing a senior thesis, or community-based learning projects over four years at Georgetown.

What is its purpose and value?

Not only do ePortfolios serve a practical purpose by allowing students to collect, archive, and publish their work, but they also help students to draw connections among different projects and to integrate topics and themes across disciplines and semesters. In selecting and organizing work to include in an ePortfolio, students are encouraged to envision the “big picture” of their academic journeys and to reflect on their overall goals and accomplishments. ePortfolios serve both a personal and a public function, helping students to synthesize work for themselves and allowing them to share that work with others.

Additionally, ePortfolios can provide an institutional benefit by allowing faculty and administrators to track student progress over time, both individually and collectively.

Georgetown ePortfolio Initiative

In the initial phase of Georgetown’s ePortfolio Initiative, ePortfolios are already being used in a variety of contexts. For example:

  • Students in Betsi Stephen’s freshman proseminar in the School of Foreign Service create ePortfolios which allow them to remain connected over four years at Georgetown, and help them to develop and refine their academic interests. These include blogs kept by students studying abroad.
  • Students working on master’s theses in the English department are using ePortfolios as research logs, allowing them to compile resources, share ideas, and track the development of their projects.
    Example: Melissa Parrish, English grad student, research/portfolio blog
  • All students in the Communication, Culture, and Technology master’s program are given portfolio blogs, where they are encouraged to reflect on their personal learning goals and on how their projects fit into those goals.
    Example: Anna Palladino, CCT
  • Plans for larger-scale integration of ePortfolios into the Georgetown curriculum are also in development. The Thresholds of Writing Project will bring together faculty from various departments in a colloquium focusing on first-year writing, in order to develop learning goals for writing within their respective disciplines and to  design course assignments which use ePortfolios to follow students’ progress in writing.

For more examples of ePortfolios and a description of some popular ePortfolio models, please see the Commons page on ePortfolios.

ePortfolio Technology: Tools for Creating ePortfolios

ePortfolios can take a variety of forms, and many different tools can be used to create them. The Georgetown ePortfolio Initiative focuses on two software programs for creating ePortfolios:

  • Blogs: WordPress blogs provide a simple way to bring together the various elements of an ePortfolio. Through the Georgetown University Commons, Georgetown’s online space for collaboration and communication tools, students and faculty can explore examples of ePortfolio blogs and can adapt existing templates for their own use.  As many students already use Commons blogs in courses, learning to use an ePortfolio blog requires little effort.
    https://commons.georgetown.edu/tools/eportfolios
  • Digication ePortfolios: We have just begun to pilot the Digication ePortfolio system at Georgetown. Digication offers a rich environment specifically structured to encourage thoughtful ePortfolio creation, and features designed for faculty offer incentive to use Digication ePortfolios at the course or curricular level. For more information about Digication ePortfolios, please email Anna Kruse.

Other platforms for creating ePortfolios include:

Resources / Bibliography: