USING E-PORTFOLIO PROGRAMS AS A STRATEGIC TOOL FOR EVALUATION AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT: FROM CREATION TO IMPLEMENTATION

How can an educational institution evaluate a student’s skills and ability, as well as help them prepare for potential career development opportunities?  Many universities are turning towards the creation and implementation of e-Portfolios.  These e-Portfolios serve several purposes, but the final outcome is whether the e-Portfolio itself can be seen as a true measure of what the student has been able to achieve – as well as serve as an indicator of their potential skills and abilities.  Thus, the key goal of the e-Portfolio is to help highlight the student’s ability to create a collection, selection, and reflection of their online works that best demonstrates their skills and abilities. 

This presentation will focus on how one university has changed their curriculum to incorporate a new type of “capstone” final course for all business undergraduate students.  As Knowles (1987) noted that “everyone [learners] should be able to participate and control their own learning process.”  While many academic curriculums are well established, there still appears to be a disconnect between student learning and career development.  As a result, there are still students leaving educational institutions not fully prepared as to how to approach the job hunting process.  
The main objective of this presentation will be to discuss how one university approached the use of e-Portfolios in the online environment in a two-fold manner.  First, they wanted to create and develop an e-Portfolio to help highlight the student’s best works.  Second, they also wanted to help the students prepare in terms of career development, as well as build an e-Portfolio demonstrating the student’s key works created in their capstone course.  In addition, examples of an e-Portfolio will be presented during this presentation to demonstrate how one virtual university has changed its final undergraduate course to personalize it towards each student’s individual achievements and abilities.  Rather than focusing on just a prescribed listing of elements to be inserted into an e-Portfolio, this type of project should be one in which the student truly feels a part of the process.  Further, the student should have some type of academic freedom to include other works which best presents the student’s overall academic achievements and abilities.
Finally, this presentation will help the participants to view, from an appreciative inquiry perspective, the positive benefits of incorporating an e-Portfolio into their curriculum.  Also, this presentation will afford the participants to learn from their peers as to how they are achieving similar or comparable results with their approaches to e-Portfolio work.  For those individuals not familiar with the e-Portfolio approach, this discussion and presentation will allow them to explore potential applications for use in their own learning environment.