E-Portfolio Seminar Held at the University of Bridgeport

From August 26 to August 28 thirty-five UB deans and faculty participated in an orientation seminar on student electronic portfolios (e-portfolios). While in the past, many universities (including some programs at UB) have encouraged maintaining paper portfolios to monitor student academic progress, the E-portfolio (a university-supported webpage for each interested student where a student will be able to establish an online record of his or her curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular progress and achievements) has become increasingly recognized as an attractive and often more convenient way to record and track student academic progress. Beginning this fall already, UB students who are interested have the possibility to develop a pilot E-Portfolio. The pilot stage will proceed carefully with students working in consultation with their professors and their advisors.

Some universities are already using such E-portfolios as a way to improve student advising and assess academic progress. Through the use of E-portfolios, it is hoped that universities will be in a better position to identify students' academic strengths as well as their deficiencies. E-portfolios should at least allow interested students to have an online site to document their skills in areas such as written communication or in problem solving by posting examples of their work. An E-portfolio might also be able to chronicle a student's performance in internships and memorialize his or her extracurricular activities. In that respect, the E-portfolios should eventually make it possible to for prospective employers and graduate schools to have a more in depth understanding of a student's talent and potential.
The University of Bridgeport E-portfolio seminar was designed and organized by Dr. Thomas Ward, Vice President for International Program Dean of the University's International College. He received funding to support the seminar from the Connecticut Department of Higher Education Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium (CTDLC). The CTDLC grant both helped to cover the seminar instructional and logistic costs and made it possible for the University to acquire 40 Dreamweaver licenses (the software tool being used to create the E-Portfolios) for student use in Mandeville Hall and in the Wahlstrom Library. It also made it possible for faculty advisors who completed the program to receive Dreamweaver licenses and have it installed on their office computers.

On August 26th, the opening day of the seminar, President Salonen and Provost Conner addressed the participants at the inception of the program. Both expressed the University's commitment to see the project develop. Dr. William Weitzer, Senior Associate Provost and Dean of the School of Continuing Education at Wesleyan University was invited as the seminar keynote speaker. Wesleyan has been using E-portfolios for two years and Dr. Weitzer provided valuable insight into the Wesleyan experience, where E-portfolios are being used primarily to assist in student advising. On August 26th and 27th Webmaster Robert Chang conducted a practicum in using Dreamweaver for the creation of webpages. In advance, Robert had designed templates for faculty webpages and for a pilot model of the student E-portfolio. His two days of presentations were well received and were frequently characterized by by UB faculty as being both extremely helpful and very clear.
Dr. Ward pointed out that one of the most important outcomes of the seminar was a decision by the Faculty Council to create of an E-Portfolio faculty committee to help to shape the long-term goals, foci, and uses of the student e-portfolio. The Faculty Council has chosen Dr. Jennifer Fredrick, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, to chair this committee.