ePortfolios

ePortfolios Home

eportfolio logo

ePortfolios are digital collections of evidence in a variety of formats that demonstrate learning over time, designed to showcase the author’s experiences and accomplishments across a variety of fields.

Scholars and advocates of ePortfolios point to their transformative potential in the educational environment. ePortfolios enhance student learning through reflection, integration and creating a record of students’ trajectory across their educational experiences, inside and outside the classroom.

ePortfolios also have the potential to transform the professional lives of faculty and other educators, facilitating unprecedented levels of interaction around broadly shared educational goals and outcomes beyond the bounds of the classroom.


In February 2015, Interim Provost Susan Elrod convened a broadly representative team, the ePortfolio Assessment Team (ePAT) that would:

  • define the ways in which ePortfolios would be most useful at Chico State;
  • research the literature on ePortfolios;
  • investigate the experiences of other campuses in their adoption, implementation and use; and,
  • consider a variety of platforms that would meet our needs.

ePAT’s extended encounter with the literature on ePortfolios, vendors offering commercial products, open-source approaches and the experiences of ePortfolio users on and off-campus led us to conceptualize the multiple dimensions of ePortfolios as a 3-legged stool. The “legs,” which represent the principal functions of ePortfolios, are:

  1. Integrative Learning: ePortfolios facilitate student learning across the individual “containers” of courses, the structured experiences of the co-curriculum and the varied lessons of the life course broadly considered;
  2. Showcase: ePortfolios allow students to demonstrate their skills, abilities, intellectual and social growth and other dimensions of their emerging personal, intellectual and professional identities to a variety of audiences, including prospective employers, and;
  3. Assessment: ePortfolios can serve as tools for gathering deep, consequential evidence of student learning, as well as harvesting individual artifacts: papers, videos, audio and other media, which can be used to conduct both formative and summative assessments of students’ college experiences.

Rubrics for ePortfolio Assessment

ePAT Awards Funds for Pilot ePortfolio Projects

ePAT awarded funds for nine Faculty Learning Communities to pilot the use of ePortfolios in AY 16-17.  Supported by funding from the Provost’s Office and substantial funding from the College Deans offices, faculty will be testing two commercial platforms (Digication and Pathbrite) as well as an open-source solution (WordPress) across several classes and multiple sections during the upcoming academic year.

Pilot ePortfolio Projects