Group 5: SCALING UP ePortfolio

February 19, 2014

• We are still early in the process of building a new college, and we are literally trying to building all of our High Impact Practices, of which eP is just one, at the same time and to scale (learning communities, capstone courses, community engagement in the curricula and co-curricula, student learning outcomes assessment based on DQP).  Reality check: not yet two years old, we are doing well by most measures.
• We have full administrative support at the highest level; we need to and will continue to emphasize the uses of ePortfolio as an integrative part of our VISION & PHILOSOPHY.
• We have a good model and we know what to do, but we need time, resources, and focus (unified purpose) to advance scaling up and ongoing phasing in.
• We should coordinate our existing working groups (the ePortfolio task force—remnants of C2L + and the Academic Technology Curriculum subcommittee) and the Assessment & PD Committee for consistent messaging, planning and clarification of goals.
• We continue to build our ePortfolio campus team, which Laura leads, by growing depth of our faculty, and we will soon add a new faculty member with expertise in academic technology.  As our total full-time faculty grow, we will consider new ways of supporting implementation of ePortfolio through direct and indirect support.  One idea might be to have rotating Guttman faculty fellows who would be responsible for specific development and implementation work over the course of a semester with appropriate reassigned time.
• We want to provide more forums or fora, especially for faculty, to talk about successful uses of ePortfolio and to surface issues that may impede our using ePortfolio to the fullest.  We will organize these this spring.
• We’ll continue to look carefully at our student, faculty, staff and institutional uses of ePortfolio to increase the sophistication and extent of use.  We already have included ePortfolio in our draft Strategic Plan and in our PMP, and we might want to consider aligning ePortfolio with other new initiatives.  For example, it has been proposed that we organize opportunities for faculty and staff to serve as student mentors, and ePortfolio could be a centerpiece of such relationships.
• We recognize the paramount importance of ongoing professional development, both for onboarding our many new part-time faculty and for sustaining full-time faculty in ways to enrich their courses. We are particularly committed to developing communities of practice and to encouraging the use of ePortfolio to enhance those communities.