Tuesday, April 26, 2011

AugieFolio template

The first draft of a Learning ePortfolio is out and ready for your feedback!

AugieFolio has been designed as a template to be used as a learning tool by students.We want the portfolio to be easy to use, especially at the beginning, and still allow for each individual student to tailor it to his/her particular needs and experiences. While, hopefully, we as faculty will guide them in its use early on, the goal of course is for students to take ownership of their portfolio to document and manage their learning.

Realize that this is just a first draft; as such it is extremely flexible. We can change the narrative description of any of the pages, the layout (the "theme"), the organizational structure, etc. In fact, any individual student can make these changes in their portfolio!

I hope you can take a look and provide feedback. More importantly, I hope you will start to envision ways that we can use this tool in our classes, departments and programs to enhance student learning!

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

LSFY Instructors


I presented the idea of a Learning ePortfolio to a group of the LSFY instructors yesterday afternoon. I began by sharing John Zubizarreta's IDEA Paper #44, The Learning Portfolio: A Powerful Idea for Significant Learning, with the group. We talked about how we as a college came to this point, the current initiatives contained in the Strategic Imperatives (esp. Strategic Imperative 3), and the natural "signposts" in a student's four-year path here at Augustana at which a learning eportfolio could be of significant value. Those include
  • completion of the LSFY program,
  • declaration of a major (or majors),
  • application for Augie Choice,
  • Senior Inquiry and
  • pursuit of a profession or graduate studies.
Focusing on writing, we are hoping that all LSFY101 Instructors will have their students archive all drafts of significant writing, the feedback they receive from the instructor and reflect on their growth in their writing abilities during the term. (The list of Writing skills from the LSFY Skills matrix as well as the LSFY writing rubric will be included in the eportfolio template.)

We are also hoping that we can train the first-year students in the use of a learning eportfolio during their orientation. Since we have decided to use Google Sites as the platform for the eportfolios, we expect that this training can be easily incorporated into training for Google Apps (e.g. GMail, Calendars, etc.) already planned. We will ask that students include a sample of their writing from High School (perhaps the one used in their college application) as the first "artifact" in their portfolio. 

I tried to make it clear that the LSFY instructors (LSFY101 in particular) are pivotal players in launching this initiative. Towards the end of my presentation I asked them to write down any obstacles (from speed bumps to high hurdles) they saw from their perspective. Alli Haskill agreed to collect those and send them via campus mail.....I'm watching my mailbox.

Next step: call together a design team to whip the template (created by Becca Noffsinger) into shape. Stay tuned!

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Welcome!

I will use this blog to document the implementation of ePortfolios as evidence of student learning at Augustana College. While ePortfolios have been discussed a number of times here at Augie, we may finally be ready to move forward thanks to a recent push for updated Strategic Imperatives (specifically, Strategic Imperative 3:
Preparing Our Students to Stand Out). Our efforts will start with our Liberal Studies First Year (LSFY) program and will attempt to document student's growth in writing. Our LSFY coordinators have chosen Google Sites as the platform for our ePortfolios.

Now we have to build the templates! Stay tuned....