E-portfolios is a digital collection of work over time that showcases the skills, abilities, values, experiences, compositions of your students through a broad range of evidence based writing.
If students are required to post their best work from each of the classes they take into an e-portfolio, then when students graduate, they can then show future employers the different papers, projects and websites they designed while in college.
Students should be required to post their best work into the e-portfolio from the very first class they take. Posting to an e-portfolio should be the last graded assignment of each class. Teachers need to make sure students have actually posted work into an e-portfolio by having students report to teachers their e-portfolio link, or have students give teachers access to their e-portfolio for grading like any other multimedia project. Many schools still have not caught on to the usefulness of e-portfolios.
Students can post their best papers, projects, websites, powerpoint presentations, group projects or forum discussion posts into their e-portfolio to show the range of their talents and their writing abilities. So if as an online teacher, you design activities where students can show off these abilities, then students will be able to post their best works into an e-portfolio.
Also, if a student is an English major, if the student places his best papers into an e-portfolio, then by the time he reaches his Capstone Research class where he/she has to write a Capstone Research paper based on his major, he would then be able to go back to his portfolio to check what his favorite topics were for that Capstone paper. I used to create the Capstone class for my university and I used to advise the other teachers to incorporate a e-portfolio assignment into their classes so students would have that e-portfolio ready to look at for their Capstone class.
There are many kinds of e-portfolios. In a face to face class, students have working portfolios which looks like a large folder with multiple drafts of the same essay they have worked on. At my face to face school, we would have students work on one essay for 3 months at a time. Each time a student finishes a draft and has it graded, he then puts that draft into his portfolio. Through time as the student progresses in writing better drafts of that paper, then both teacher and student can look back into the portfolio to see how much the student has progressed in his/her writing skill from the beginning of the writing project until the end.
When teaching face to face, I have had many students complain how 'bored' they were re-writing the same essay over and over again because they wanted to move on to the next topic. However, after they finish the wriitng project and see how much they have progressed, then they become convinced that having a working writing portfolio is the best invention since sliced bread because when a student sees his writing progress, he gets pumped to want to work on more essays and to even develop a life long love for writing or journaling!
For adults, the most easy example of a e-portfolio is your Linked In profile which allows Linked-In users to upload samples of a user's best work from many different jobs. A user can upload an engaging Powerpoint presentation that impressed the company. A teacher can upload an inspiring lesson plan to her Linked In profile. Users can also upload links to teaching portfolio websites like I did with my Linked In profile to showcase a person's web design skills and to show employers even more examples of the user's work located on that person's teaching portfolio or website. Here is the link to my Linked In profile (e-portfolio) https://www.linkedin.com/in/yvonne-ho-69856717a/
E-portfolios provide a rich resource for both students and faculty to learn about achievement of important outcomes over time, make connections among disparate parts of the curriculum, gain insights leading to improvement, and develop identities as learners or as facilitators of learning. I love the idea of my employers seeing examples of my abilities and of my subject matter expertise. On my Linked in page, I provide employers a link to this blog which showcases my knowledge of teaching and my love of research. There is nothing like an e-portfolio to get employers to see the broad range of your abilities and to show students the progress they are making in their work. I suggest all teachers include e-portfolios into their curriculum.
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