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ePortfolio The ePortfolio program at LaGuardia Community College continues to be our showcase for integrated education. Through the ePortfolio, students can make visible connections across disciplines and semesters and link academic learning to work and lived experience. Meanwhile, it also provides opportunities for faculty and institutional learning, putting student work and student learning at the center of college-wide conversation. Our work with the ePortfolio program over the past five years has taught us significant lessons about teaching, learning, and institutional change. It represents a extensive and highly substantial success in bringing faculty, students, and staff together to transform our understanding of a LaGuardia education. LaGuardia's ePortfolio project has drawn national attention as one of the largest and most vibrant ePortfolio projects in higher education. In the 2005-2006 academic year alone, 5, 042 LaGuardia students worked with ePortfolio, depositing work for assessment and building web-based ePortfolios that represent their learning. This brings us almost half-way to our goal of having every LaGuardia student work with ePortfolio. This achievement builds upon the work of scores of faculty and staff, including an exciting new group of highly skilled "ePortfolio Consultants," who teach students how to design and build their ePortfolios. As ePortfolio has begun to demonstrate concrete and highly positive outcomes -- from increases in student engagement in learning to improved pass rates in key courses -- it has attracted a strong institutional commitment. The following historical summary provides an overview of the growth of the project and our plans for the future. For additional information, see our recent article, ePortfolio@LaGuardia: A Learning Project and the LaGuardia ePortfolio website, which provides background information, web tutorials, and a range of sample ePortfolios. ePortfolio History 2001-2002: Exploring ePortfolio The college began its ePortfolio initiative with rigorous research and planning. In December 2001, Dean Paul Arcario convened a college-wide ePortfolio Planning Committee to study the issues related to the ePortfolio and plan the pilot program for Fall 2002. A Faculty Research Team chaired by Prof. Maureen Doyle and Dr. Bret Eynon, Director of the LaGuardia Center for Teaching & Learning, did extensive study of best practices around the country. Visiting campuses, attending conferences, and bringing speakers to LaGuardia helped build a foundation for planning. Meanwhile, the Senate Sub-Committee on Assessment held meetings with every department to discuss ways that student work collected through the ePortfolio system could be used for faculty-led program assessment. By the end of the year the Faculty Research Team had issued a working paper, with recommendations for implementing ePortfolio, and the Senate had unanimously approved an Assessment Plan that incorporated the use of student work gathered through ePortfolio. 2002-2003: Piloting ePortfolio Based on this planning process, in 2002 the ePortfolio initiative moved to its pilot phase. Twenty-two faculty members from across the college took part a year-long process of development and classroom testing of ePortfolio processes that provided significant information and insight for the College as a whole. Using a provisional ePortfolio system created by Prof. James Richardson of the Computer and Information Systems Department, faculty tested the use of ePortfolios in key areas identified by the college's assessment plan, with a particular emphasis on possibilities in the Freshman Year courses. Members of the pilot project developed curriculum tools, reported on their experiences, and helped the project staff revise and adapt the ePortfolio process, in preparation for the expansion of the process in the 2003-2004 academic year. Just over 800 students created ePortfolios in this year. While faculty moved ahead with the pilot, using the provisional system, Richardson reviewed commercial ePortfolio packages and helped the College select a system designed by a Blackboard partner, Concord Masterfile. Concord began work on customizing their system to meet LaGuardia needs, with installation and launch planned for August 2003. 2003-2004: ePortfolio in the First Year Academy In the 2003-4 school year, the ePortfolio project focused on supporting LaGuardia's effort to launch its First Year Academy program, designed to create learning communities that connect basic skills courses with the New Student Seminar and introductory courses in the major. These courses, to be followed up in the second semester by a new pre-internship course in the Cooperative Education Department, Fundamentals of Professional Advancement, were designed to help students who need basic skills courses to move ahead to required courses in their majors, and to connect with a range of co-curricular events and services. ePortfolio would be an integral element in the Academies. Twenty faculty designed learning community courses for students in the Business and Technology Academy. A Studio Hour was added to provide tutorial support for students as they learned how to build their ePortfolios. Delays in the design and installation of the Concord system slowed the implementation of the ePortfolio in this year. With Concord operative by March, the Academy seminar moved to implementation in Spring. A total of 360 LaGuardia students built ePortfolios in this year. Meanwhile, the Assessment Sub-Committee began to design the rubrics for the college's core competencies. 2004-2005: The ePortfolio Takes Root The ePortfolio project gathered momentum as it moved into its third year of implementation. The Business/ Technology Academy moved to its second year of implementation. And the College launched the Liberal Arts Academy and the Allied Health and Science Academy, engaging faculty in planning and developing the courses in the Fall semester and piloting them in the Spring. More than 40 took part in this effort. Meanwhile, an additional 30 faculty took part in the ePortfolio Explorer seminar. With the help of faculty and the ePortfolio Consultants, who staffed the ePortfolio Studio, more than 2,000 LaGuardia students built ePortfolios in 2004-5. Our first set of ePortfolio Scholars, students who have chosen to put extra work into their ePortfolios, began creating showcase ePortfolios in a range of disciplines and majors. The Senate Assessment SubCommittee completed the rubric for Critical Literacy (Reading, Writing and Critical Thinking) and held workshops exploring the use of student work for program assessment. Data analysis showed the ePortfolio helped students deepen their engagement with key learning goals, such as critical thinking, writing, and synthesis of new knowledge. 2005-2006: Expanding and Deepening the ePortfolio Now in its fourth implementation year, the ePortfolio project is demonstrating important benefits for student learning and has more than doubled in size, with more than 5,000 LaGuardia students building ePortfolios in the 2005-6 school year. This growth, which gives LaGuardia one of the largest ePortfolio programs in higher education nationwide, is based upon significant institutional commitment, in space, staff lines, and technical support. Moving from grant support to institutional support, the College has expanded the ePortfolio staff with a team of "ePortfolio Consultants," who are doing exciting work with students and faculty. The College also built a second ePortfolio Studio, opened in March 2006. The IT Division has increased its focus building the skills necessary to manage ePortfolio. The past year has seen key progress on integrating ePortfolio into college structures and campus culture. The Academy program continues to introduce students to ePortfolio in their first semester at LaGuardia. And the Fundamentals of Professional Advancement course grew dramatically in Spring 2006, adding both depth and scope to students' ePortfolio work. A range of other ePortfolio-related efforts moved forward: an ePortfolio Leadership Colloquium provided opportunities for faculty to deepen their own work and engage in advanced discussion around ePortfolio; rubrics were completed for Oral Communication and Information Literacy; the Human Services Program and the Fine Arts Program decided to build ePortfolio into their requirements; and two Departments, (the Education and Language Acquistion Department and the Accounting and Managerial Studies Department) have launched pilot programs to test the assessment of longitudinal bodies of student work collected through ePortfolio system. As the project deepens and expands, more and more LaGuardia students are starting to work on their ePortfolios in multiple semesters, helping us move towards the ideal of longitudinal portfolios evolving over the entire course of a student's stay at LaGuardia. In part as a result, students' ePortfolios are growing increasingly sophisticated. Visual design of the ePortfolio has taken great strides, and we are beginning to see more and more interesting use of audio and video. Student reflections are growing more thoughtful, and are taking a range of formats. For example, in one portfolio, an art student who was created a video "talk aloud" reflecting on and illustrating her thinking as she created a painting for her fine arts class. (For samples of students' portfolios, click here. A video documenting LaGuardia students presenting their ePortfolios at a college-wide showcase is available on the front page of the LaGuardia's ILP 2006 Snapshot.) LaGuardia's Office of Institutional Research has been collecting wide range of data on ePortfolio classes, and while the results are still preliminary in nature, they are suggestive. Formative feedback from faculty and students has been overwhelmingly postive. Analysis of data generated by the Community College Survey of Student Engagement shows that students in ePortfolio classes show significant gains in critical thinking, writing, and engagement in the learning process, compared both to national norms and comparison groups of LaGuardia students. And the course pass rate for students in ePortfolio classes taught by trained and experienced ePortfolio faculty is significantly higher than the pass rate in comparable non-ePortfolio courses. Plans for future work with ePortfolio are well underway. The Center for Teaching and Learning will be leading 3 major ePortfolio seminars in 2006-7, including the new ePortfolio in the Professions seminar, focusing on work with upper level students in nursing, accounting, commercial photography, marketing, physical therapy, and other professions, helping faculty envision the role of ePortfolios for graduating and certifying students in these key areas. Work on assessment and evaluation is moving forward, and the IT Division has begun to explore the use of Open Source technology to more effectively tailor the ePortfolio system to LaGuardia needs. Three other CUNY campuses have launched ePortfolio projects. And the Center has submitted three major grant proposals to supplement College support and further realize the potential of ePortfolio as a tool for integrated learning at LaGuardia.
LaGuardia's ePortfolio Site
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