Eportfolios, Assessment, and General Education Transformation

Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) is an urban, multicampus institution that has been on a twelve-year journey to improve its general education program and assess essential learning outcomes. Over the course of our journey, we have learned much about how students are actually experiencing general education, and about the strengths and limitations of using eportfolios to assess student learning.A 2004 visit from our regional accrediting body made us acutely aware that our general education program lacked learning outcomes and was only being assessed indirectly using surveys that asked graduating students whether they were satisfied with their experience. Clearly, we had much to do. We gathered a committee of faculty, academic administrators, and student affairs staff that worked diligently in summer 2005 to write a set of joint institutional and general education learning outcomes that passed the faculty senate in the fall of that year. Our curriculum committees then worked for two years to ensure that those high-level learning outcomes were translated in increasing detail into program- and course-level learning outcomes, because we wanted to be able to collect data only once-in courses, using actual student work-and use that data to assess academic programs and general education,EPORTFOLIO IMPLEMENTATIONAt the same time that we embedded learning outcomes at all levels of our institution, a handful of faculty in a variety of disciplines used a Utah Higher Education Technology Initiative grant to begin piloting eportfolios in their courses. They experimented with different eportfolio platforms, talked with each other about their relative merits, and played around with how best to use eportfolios in the classroom. After four years of valuable experience piloting eportfolios, learning from other institutions such as La Guardia Community College, and reading the small but growing literature on the potential for eportfolios, we decided in 2009 to put forward a proposal to implement eportfolios as a requirement in all general education courses. After considerable discussion in curriculum and faculty governance bodies, the proposal passed and was implemented in summer 2010.The basic principles of our eportfolio implementation are simple but have had a powerful impact on the institution and on student learning. Electronic portfolios are not a graduation requirement, but they are a required component of every general education course. Students maintain one integrative eportfolio, and faculty in each general education course ask students to archive at least one signature assignment and reflection from the course. A signature assignment is a realistic application of knowledge-such as a paper, presentation, or project-that requires students to demonstrate work relevant to two or more of the general education learning outcomes. We encourage but do not require faculty to identify more than one signature assignment in the course so students can make curatorial decisions about the work they want to showcase. Faculty design their own reflection prompts, but on our faculty support site (www.facultyeportfolioresource.weebly.com), we provide them generic ideas such as the following:* Make connections between this general education course and others you have taken. * Make connections between your academic work and your life or the broader world. * Explain how your performance on this signature assignment demonstrates your progress toward general education learning outcomes. * Reflect on your thought processes or actions as you faced the challenges of completing the assignment itself.Learning outcomes are further reinforced on the "goals and outcomes" page of a student's portfolio. In addition to listing their personal and professional goals on that page, students also list SLCC s general education learning outcomes. We encourage students to link from each outcome to evidence in the portfolio indicating that they are attaining it. …