Building electronic portfolios demonstrated at CSC

Dr. Kim Boyd, an associate dean in the School of Education at Oral Robert University in Tulsa, Okla., spent two days on the CSC campus demonstrating and explaining how her institution develops electronic portfolios for each student and uses the information to assess student performance and growth.

The information also is extremely useful for each academic department in assessing its history and progress, she said.

Boyd said each year she gives similar presentations on at least 10 campuses across the nation. She said ORU was one of the first educational institutions in the nation to develop the resource and utilize it campus-wide.

“We think it’s a great tool for both the students and the faculty and many other colleges and universities have adopted similar systems,” said Boyd. “All of the Oklahoma schools have learned about it and several of them are using it.”

The record-keeping and resulting portfolios are similar to an old-fashioned scrapbook except everything is kept on a computer and can be put on a CD or e-mailed anyplace. It keeps tabs on the array of material students generate while in college and becomes available for the students, their academic advisors and professors and eventually their potential employers, if the students wish to use it in their job search.

“This program is a good way to collect data and to assess and track student progress throughout their college experience,” said Patti Blundell, associate professor of education at CSC. “It has benefits for the students and also helps the college in evaluating its programs. It puts everything into a neat package.”

Another CSC education professor, Dr. Jerry Neff, said the system is very useful for recording and assessing student progress. He noted that since it is network based, anyone with a password can access it from his or her computer and download the data to a spreadsheet for further analysis.

The potential for students to use the material for the job search may be the most intriguing aspect of the collection system, Boyd said. She said students can burn a CD of their work and mail it anyplace in the world to prospective employers. She added it is not out of reason that a student could use the data that has been collected to give a power-point demonstration of his or her college papers and projects during the interview process.

She said art and engineering students at ORU, in particular, have found the electronic portfolios to be a great help in landing jobs.

CSC personnel said the faculty and administration will meet in the near future to study the program further and then decide whether to utilize it. Several agreed that it appears to be a beneficial tool.