How to innovate and improve your E-portfolio

We’re all familiar with traditional student portfolios that showcase individual projects or achievements, but institutional portfolios are gaining ground as a means for departments and schools to evaluate learning holistically and better tailor curricula. At this level, ePortfolios can help assess the effect of an entire educational experience in order to drive innovation and improvement and measure success. 

E-portfolio tips:

1. Brevity is best – As in a great résumé, you want to provide clear, direct information about yourself, your work and your achievements. Providing snippets or brief introductions to your work that lead to or link to full descriptions and examples are best.

2. Organization is everything – Make sure your eportfolio is easy to navigate and browse with the most important information available in the fewest clicks possible. You don’t want to miss the opportunity to impress someone if your best work is buried in too much information.

3. Make it searchable – Use keywords throughout your eportfolio so that when employers are searching for potential hires they will more readily find yours. Linking to related Web sites, resources and professional organizations will increase the searchability of your eportfolio. Remember to include the Web address of your eportfolio on your résumé and in the footer of any e-mails you send related to your job search.

4. Express yourself – Eportfolios should be uniquely you, so make sure you have some level of customization in how your work is presented. Keep it simple and consistent with readable font and files that are not too big to download to view (no more than 2-5 MB).

5. Keep it professional – It’s particularly important that any writing and files (like images, movies, PDFs, etc.) in your eportfolio are free of any grammatical errors, are of the highest quality and reflect your most positive aspects you want to share with potential employers.

In conclusion:

Accessiblity and flexibility. ePortfolios are unrivaled in their ability to showcase information easily using very little physical space. Students and institutions alike can use an ePortfolio to weave various pieces of information together through hyperlinks, update it instantly, share it quickly, and protect it from loss or destruction permanently.

Assessment and communication. ePortfolios can often provide more dynamic insight into learning than traditional tests or workshop exercises. Applied properly, ePortfolios showcase how a student’s work directly relates to course standards, track how that work evolves over time, and serve as a living document of the applied learning process. For institutions, ePortfolios can be valuable both in providing a broad view of programmatic success to different audiences and in augmenting traditional marketing efforts by conveying large amounts of information in compelling ways.

Technical skills development. Building and maintaining an ePortfolio can help students gain valuable new computer skills and apply existing skills in practical ways. Further, students learn the importance of demonstrating and communicating their knowledge and advocating for themselves in a marketplace of competitors.

As learning and technology continue to merge in new and exciting ways, no doubt ePortfolios will play a central part in how students, faculty, and institutions communicate and innovate. Schools that offer flexible and expanded educational tools not only support multi-dimensional learning experiences, they help students showcase that learning and apply it for practical and professional success.