A good chunk of the initial energy of Penn State’s e-portfolio initiative focused on supporting e-portfolio activity by writing specifications for and finding, modifying or developing an enterprise solution that would both provide a student-centered e-portfolio interface to support learning but also provide faculty and administrators with tools that could tap this evidence of learning to support program evaluation. Based primarily on the contrary nature of both of these purposes, this ‘silver bullet’ has yet to be found.
Consequently, Penn State seems to be moving in two different directions. Deployment of the Penn State Blog (Moveable Type 4) provides users with a simple yet flexible interface for supporting the learning, connecting and sharing of collegiate experience.
But what about assessment? Has it been eliminated from the e-portfolio picture?
While there is a great deal that faculty can learn about the developmental work that takes place as a student’s e-portfolio or blog takes shape and develops over time, capturing all of this data from all students for the purposes of determining program effectiveness would be unnecessarily messy.
Teaming with faculty from the Department of Counselor Education, Counseling Psychology and Rehabilitation Services the e-Portfolio Initiative sought local Penn State resources to help address their program evaluation and accreditation needs. Having established a curriculum map that articulates key assessment activities related to accreditation standards, WebLion, Penn State’s customization of a Plone based open source content management software was asked to help develop a solution. Very quickly, developers were able to create an online repository that faculty can use to upload, store and tag evidence of student learning based on these standards. What was previously an inefficient and often redundant paper-based process, (this program, for example, must address the needs of three accreditation agencies – NCATE, CACREP and PDE), has become a more streamlined assessment management system that can be queried at any time to review progress on key learning outcomes by faculty, assessment coordinators and when ready outside auditors.
An important distinction needs to be made with regards to this system. Rather than automatically grabbing all student submissions from an ANGEL dropbox for instance, faculty select representative examples of evidence from the key assessment activities that take place in the courses that they teach and only upload these examples to the system. For instance, it may seem reasonable to select nine examples of a key assessment activity as a representative sample of student work (three superior, three average and three poor examples) from each course section. Over the course of an accreditation cycle, it is assumed that enough evidence of student learning has accumulated such that justifications for what is taught and how can be made.
For more information about WebLion and Assessment Management contact Mike Halm.