What is it?
A student e-Portfolio is a web-based, student curated collection of papers, images, projects, and reflections focused on representing the student’s growth in learning. It encompasses coursework as well as co-curricular and life experiences and itself functions as an important aspect of student learning. Students are invited to be creative in fashioning their own portfolio to represent their skills, talents, and the most important experiences of their own education. The e-Portfolio helps make these experiences and the learning encompassed by them visible to students, their peers, their faculty, and external audiences.
Why do we do it?
Students are required to create an e-Portfolio because it contributes in important ways to their learning. As a High Impact Practice, e-Portfolios help students engage more deeply with their own learning and take responsibility for their own development as learners. This is important for the success of students both in and out of the classroom.
E-Portfolio Layout
The e-Portfolio is composed of a number of webpages within Google Sites. These pages include the headings listed below. Following each link will provide more information and suggested prompts for each page. The questions and prompts are meant to serve as a guide to building an e-Portfolio, but students will also receive prompts from their professors. After writing the text in response to a prompt, students usually prefer to delete the prompt itself.
The pages will be developed over the course of the student’s career at UWG, so the site will be changing with each semester and will eventually be publishable and transferable so that the student can continue to use the site after he or she leaves UWG.
While each page is customizable for each student, there will be prompts provided in students’ HONR-prefixed courses asking students to reflect on some aspect of their learning or to add something to their e-Portfolio. E-portfolios will be shared each semester with the Dean of the Honors College and with any Honors College faculty the student has that semester. The Dean and the faculty will provide feedback to the student about what the e-Portfolio exhibits.
**We are grateful to Bret Eynon and Laura M. Gambino for their book High-Impact ePortfolio Practice, Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2017 which was helpful in creating these descriptions and to LaGuardia Community College whose information on Introductory ePortfolio Prompts was highly instrumental in the structure of our own ePortfolio system.