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Two key elements of implementing ePortfolios as a HIP are the integrative nature of their use throughout the educational experience, and intentional inclusion of expectations for deep reflection allowing participants to form meaningful connections between their various experiences. Simply using an ePortfolio as a method for sharing work is also associated with positive gains, but not nearly as many as when they are paired with reflective work.

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A workshop that takes a deeper dive into the research linking reflective ePortfolios to increased student retention, completion, and satisfaction rates, when done well (and what "doing it well" means!). Participants will also be encouraged to identify appropriate resources available to them, and begin developing strategies and processes that taylor the use of an ePortfolio assignment to the objectives of a specific course or program.

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ePortfolios are electronic collections of artifacts that are typically used to showcase the interests, goals, and achievements of individuals and/or groups. As a digital medium, ePortfolios open up opportunities for sharing evidence of work in fresh and dynamic ways.

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ePortfolios were added to the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ (AAC&U) list of High Impact Practices (HIP) in 2016 as research confirmed that creating ePortfolios over time by curating collections of artifacts and reflecting on personal and academic growth increases retention, completion, and satisfaction rates.

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Association of American Colleges & Universities

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ePortfolios, digital repositories of student work, have been transforming students' educational experiences for two decades. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has long advocated ePortfolio adoption throughout higher education. As AAC&U's Liberal Education and America's Progress (LEAP) initiative has gained prominence, the necessity for all students to have the opportunity to engage with high-quality learning in all the Essential Learning Outcomes (ELOs) has become clear. The need to increase access to higher education for a broad and diverse population has also highlighted the necessity of more diverse pedagogies and assessments that capture and reflect the multitude of modes through which today's students demonstrate their learning. ePortfolios allow faculty and other educational professionals to help students organize their learning; preserve the variety of forms in which their learning occurs; and reflect upon their learning. They also enable the assessment of level of mastery for a broad set of ELOs.

In 2016, based upon proliferating research examining the efficacy of ePortfolios, AAC&U added ePortfolios to its list of High-Impact Practices (HIPs). As noted in the International Journal of ePortfolio, "Key milestones leading to AAC&U's decision include the publication ten years ago of the Handbook of Research on ePortfolios (Jafar & Kaufman, 2006); research performed by many campuses through the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research as well as associated publications (e.g, Cambridge, Cambridge, & Yancey, 2009); the launch in 2011 and the sustained publication since then of the peer-reviewed International Journal of ePortfolio; and in January 2016, the publication of research resulting from the Connect to Learning (C2L) project (Eynon & Gambino, 2017)." This scholarly foundation provides clear evidence regarding the effectiveness of ePortfolios as well as guidance regarding how to do ePortfolios well. AAC&U hopes to accelerate practice, research, and publication in this domain by providing key tools and publication venues for practitioners and researchers:

The electronic or digital portfolio is an ideal format for collecting evidence of student learning, especially for those outcomes not amenable or appropriate for standardized measurement. Additionally, ePortfolios can facilitate student reflection upon and engagement with their own learning across multiyear degree programs, across different institutions, and across diverse learning styles while helping students set and achieve personal learning goals. ePortfolios provide a transparent and portable medium for showcasing the broad range of complex ways students are asked to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities for purposes such as graduate school and job applications as well as for benchmarking achievement among peer institutions. Examples of ePortfolios can be found below.

ePortfolios for Learning:

ePortfolios for Assessment:

ePortfolios for Professional Development and Employment:

With the release of the Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP), which lays out the essential learning for any associate, baccalaureate, or master's degree and the levels of demonstrated learning competence expected for attainment of each degree, ePortfolios have even more utility as unified ways for students to document their integrated learning among and across their educational pathways toward a degree. In addition, the principles and models for integrative general education programs developed through AAC&U's General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs) initiative are particularly well suited for an ePortfolio framework, which can help students, faculty, and others map the intentional pathways to demonstrated achievement of essential learning goals. When combined with VALUE rubrics, which mirror the ELOs, ePortfolios provide a means for direct assessment of student work drawn from the curriculum, cocurriculum, and beyond the campus. The work students produce through embedded assignments in courses, programs, activities, internships, research projects, and other HIPs becomes the basis for student progress and attainment in a unified ePortfolio system. ePortfolios create transparency around demonstrated learning and allow student artifacts to be used as evidence of accomplishment for employment, graduate school, or accountability and reporting to external audiences.

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ePortfolios, digital repositories of student work, have been transforming students' educational experiences for two decades. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has long advocated ePortfolio adoption throughout higher education. As AAC&U's Liberal Education and America's Progress (LEAP) initiative has gained prominence, the necessity for all students to have the opportunity to engage with high-quality learning in all the Essential Learning Outcomes (ELOs) has become clear.

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The following rubric was developed using the 6 behaviors of well-done HIPs, elements from AAC&U’s Integrative Learning VALUE Rubric, and feedback from practitioners across a variety of application contexts at the University of Denver. This High Impact Practice Rubric for Reflective ePortfolios is intended to provide guidelines for incorporating reflective ePortfolios as assignments in individual courses, academic programs, and co-curricular learning experiences. This rubric will be piloted across several contexts, and evaluated by members of a faculty learning community for relevance and effectiveness.

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What is Integrative Learning?

The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) defines Integrative Learning as "an understanding and a disposition that a student builds across the curriculum and co-curriculum, from making simple connections among ideas and experiences to synthesizing and transferring learning to new, complex situations within and beyond the campus" (2009). Integrative Learning is now widely recognized as a key outcome in the undergraduate learning experience.

At the University of Denver, Integrative Learning is present in various campus wide programs including; ASEM and FSEM courses (first and final year learning experiences), student learning communities, diversity and global learning initiatives, the Center for Community Engagement to advance Scholarship and Learning (CCESL), community internships, and more. Many faculty also incorporate integrative learning in the classroom through practices like reflective assignments, ePortfolio projects, service-based learning, collaborative assignments, and experiential learning. In the Office of Teaching and Learning (OTL), Integrative Learning is supported through facilitated workshops, faculty learning communities, and one-on-one consultations. Please see the links in the content below for additional resources related to Integrative Learning.

Characteristics of Integrative Learning

It is developed through both curricular and co-curricular experiences.

It involves synthesis and transfer of ideas to new situations.

It requires students to identify connections between different concepts and ideas.

It provides tools for integrating disparate facts, theories, and contexts.

It is a set of skills for understanding these connections that is built over time.

It begins with connections between previous knowledge and new classroom learning, then between one classroom setting to another, and finally between academic and non-academic (real-life) settings.

It is typically represented through self-assessment, reflection, or creative work

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What is Integrative Learning? The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) defines Integrative Learning as "an understanding and a disposition that a student builds across the curriculum and co-curriculum, from making simple connections among ideas and experiences to synthesizing and transferring learning to new, complex situations within and beyond the campus" (2009).

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Association of American Colleges & Universities

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Below is an excerpt from High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter High-Impact Educational Practices: A Brief Overview , by George D. Kuh (AAC&U, 2008).
Chart of High-Impact Practices (pdf)

The following teaching and learning practices have been widely tested and have been shown to be beneficial for college students from many backgrounds. These practices take many different forms, depending on learner characteristics and on institutional priorities and contexts.

On many campuses, assessment of student involvement in active learning practices such as these has made it possible to assess the practices' contribution to students' cumulative learning. However, on almost all campuses, utilization of active learning practices is unsystematic, to the detriment of student learning. Presented below are brief descriptions of high-impact practices that educational research suggests increase rates of student retention and student engagement.

First-Year Seminars and Experiences
Many schools now build into the curriculum first-year seminars or other programs that bring small groups of students together with faculty or staff on a regular basis. The highest-quality first-year experiences place a strong emphasis on critical inquiry, frequent writing, information literacy, collaborative learning, and other skills that develop students' intellectual and practical competencies. First-year seminars can also involve students with cutting-edge questions in scholarship and with faculty members' own research.

Common Intellectual Experiences
The older idea of a "core" curriculum has evolved into a variety of modern forms, such as a set of required common courses or a vertically organized general education program that includes advanced integrative studies and/or required participation in a learning community. These programs often combine broad themes-e.g., technology and society, global interdependence-with a variety of curricular and cocurricular options for students.

Learning Communities
The key goals for learning communities are to encourage integration of learning across courses and to involve students with "big questions" that matter beyond the classroom. Students take two or more linked courses as a group and work closely with one another and with their professors. Many learning communities explore a common topic and/or common readings through the lenses of different disciplines. Some deliberately link "liberal arts" and "professional courses"; others feature service learning.

Writing-Intensive Courses
These courses emphasize writing at all levels of instruction and across the curriculum, including final-year projects. Students are encouraged to produce and revise various forms of writing for different audiences in different disciplines. The effectiveness of this repeated practice "across the curriculum" has led to parallel efforts in such areas as quantitative reasoning, oral communication, information literacy, and, on some campuses, ethical inquiry.

Collaborative Assignments and Projects
Collaborative learning combines two key goals: learning to work and solve problems in the company of others, and sharpening one's own understanding by listening seriously to the insights of others, especially those with different backgrounds and life experiences. Approaches range from study groups within a course, to team-based assignments and writing, to cooperative projects and research.

Undergraduate Research
Many colleges and universities are now providing research experiences for students in all disciplines. Undergraduate research, however, has been most prominently used in science disciplines. With strong support from the National Science Foundation and the research community, scientists are reshaping their courses to connect key concepts and questions with students' early and active involvement in systematic investigation and research. The goal is to involve students with actively contested questions, empirical observation, cutting-edge technologies, and the sense of excitement that comes from working to answer important questions.

Diversity/Global Learning
Many colleges and universities now emphasize courses and programs that help students explore cultures, life experiences, and worldviews different from their own. These studies-which may address US diversity, world cultures, or both-often explore "difficult differences" such as racial, ethnic, and gender inequality, or continuing struggles around the globe for human rights, freedom, and power. Frequently, intercultural studies are augmented by experiential learning in the community and/or by study abroad.

ePortfolios
ePortfolios are the latest addition to AAC&U's list of high-impact educational practices, and higher education has developed a range of ways to implement them for teaching and learning, programmatic assessment, and career development. ePortfolios enable students to electronically collect their work over time, reflect upon their personal and academic growth, and then share selected items with others, such as professors, advisors, and potential employers. Because collection over time is a key element of the ePortfolio process, employing ePortfolios in collaboration with other high-impact practices provides opportunities for students to make connections between various educational experiences.

Service Learning, Community-Based Learning
In these programs, field-based "experiential learning" with community partners is an instructional strategy-and often a required part of the course. The idea is to give students direct experience with issues they are studying in the curriculum and with ongoing efforts to analyze and solve problems in the community. A key element in these programs is the opportunity students have to both apply what they are learning in real-world settings and reflect in a classroom setting on their service experiences. These programs model the idea that giving something back to the community is an important college outcome, and that working with community partners is good preparation for citizenship, work, and life.

Internships
Internships are another increasingly common form of experiential learning. The idea is to provide students with direct experience in a work setting-usually related to their career interests-and to give them the benefit of supervision and coaching from professionals in the field. If the internship is taken for course credit, students complete a project or paper that is approved by a faculty member.

Capstone Courses and Projects
Whether they're called "senior capstones" or some other name, these culminating experiences require students nearing the end of their college years to create a project of some sort that integrates and applies what they've learned. The project might be a research paper, a performance, a portfolio of "best work," or an exhibit of artwork. Capstones are offered both in departmental programs and, increasingly, in general education as well.

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A Brief Overview Below is an excerpt from High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter, by George D. Kuh (AAC&U, 2008). Chart of High-Impact Practices (pdf) High-Impact Educational Practices: A Brief Overview The following teaching and learning practices have been widely tested and have been shown to be beneficial for college students from many backgrounds.

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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A decade has passed since the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) published George D. Kuh's seminal report "High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter." Kuh (2008) argued that student learning is negatively impacted by the unsystematic utilization of active learning practices and he presented 10 high-impact active learning educational practices that, "according to a growing array of research studies, are correlated with positive educational results for students from widely varying backgrounds" (p. 1). The High-Impact Practices (HIPs) identified by Kuh (2008) include:

First-year experiences

Common intellectual experiences

Learning communities

Writing-intensive courses

Collaborative assignments and projects

Undergraduate research

Diversity/global learning

Service learning, community-based learning

Internships

Capstone courses and projects

ePortfolios (added 2016)

Kuh (2008) recommended that "each institution take action to ensure that all students participate in at least two of these practices" (p. 7). One challenge with this idea is that one faculty member most often cannot institute these types of larger changes. For instance, if you feel your institution would benefit from first-year experience seminars, the development of such courses would likely require support from faculty and administrators plus approvals through the school's governance process. Fortunately, for faculty who want to avoid those larger scale institutional level projects, there are elements of high-impact practices that can be incorporated at the course level.

Instead of focusing on the list of 10 practices, faculty who want to inform the development of their courses with these concepts should instead focus on the behaviors underlying each. Kuh (2008) suggests that when executed well, HIPs should include six specific behaviors. He suggest students should:

1. Invest time and effort

2. Interact with faculty and peers about substantive matters

3. Experience diversity

4. Respond to more frequent feedback

5. Reflect and integrate learning

6. Discover the relevance of learning through real-world applications

In order to leverage high-impact practices and the associated student behaviors, faculty should first reflect on their strengths and align their teaching schedule to them. If your talents are for teaching capstone courses, coordinate with your dean to teach senior-level courses. If you have strong skills in building online courses, developing elements similar to an ePortfolio may create summative projects in your course that are engaging for the students and fun for you to grade. If you have an existing course that you've been teaching for a while, consider what changes you might be able to incorporate.

For one of our authors, incorporating these behaviors meant revising an existing assignment. In a media writing course, students learned how to write public service announcements (PSA). To leverage these high-impact practices, an existing assignment was modified. Instead of having students write PSAs for fictional clients, an actual client was found. Partnering with a local non-profit organization to create a service learning project, students worked with their peers, their instructor and a representative from the non-profit to learn about the organization's communication needs and brainstorm possible solutions. Feedback was provided to students throughout the entire writing process which culminated in the creation of an actual PSA video (partnering with another faculty member from a video production course) and the final product was distributed through the organization's website and social media sites providing students with a real-world experience. Before concluding the project, students were asked to reflect on the project and how they integrated the course materials into the activity. This activity required a substantial investment of time and allowed students to engage with each other, their professor and employees from all levels within the partner organization. The activity incorporated all six behaviors and it was well received by students.

It's important to remember that the design and incorporation of HIPs into courses should be intentional. Students need to have a clear explanation of the value of the activity, why it's important (either as a skill- or disposition-builder), and how it will help them achieve a certain outcome. This transparency helps gain student buy-in and creates a faculty/student partnership centered on student success.

Getting started with this process is easy. First, determine whether or not you are engaging in HIPs already. Take an audit of your course and compare your activities and assignments to the six student behaviors mentioned earlier. You may be surprised to discover that you may already be incorporating high-impact practices, but you might have not identified them as such. Based on your findings, consider how you can either adjust an existing activity or if there is a need to create a new one. If you need to create a new activity, use the six student behaviors as a guide and how they can help students achieve the course learning outcomes. Some potential activities with these attributes might include partnering with another faculty member to create a learning community, incorporating collaborative assignments and projects, engaging students in research projects, or adding a service learning activity to your syllabus to name a few. There's no limit to the potential ways these behaviors can be incorporated in any discipline.

Reference

Kuh, George D. (2008). "High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter." AAC&U, Washington, D.C.

Priscilla Hobbs is the Associate Dean of General Education and Interdisciplinary Studies at Southern New Hampshire University. She hold a PhD in Mythological Studies with emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and is the author of Walt's Utopia: Disneyland and American Mythmaking.
Evan Kropp is the Associate Dean of Faculty, Communication and Philosophy at Southern New Hampshire University. He holds a PhD in Communication from the University of Georgia where he also earned a Graduate Certificate in Interdisciplinary University Teaching.

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Leveraging High-Impact Practices at the Course Level | Faculty Focus

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A decade has passed since the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) published George D. Kuh's seminal report "High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter."

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Association of American Colleges & Universities

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As colleges and universities embrace high-impact practices (HIPs), we can envision a future-as yet a fantasy world-where they become more common, anchored in curricular pathways and designed to improve the retention and graduation rates of new majority students. At the same time, we see the accelerating adoption trajectory of electronic portfolios (e-portfolios), which suggests that they might also become commonplace in our higher education system. What would the educational landscape look like in this future where HIPs and e-portfolios took prominent places in the lives of students at colleges and universities?

We're speculating in this article about a fantasy world where HIPs predominate in higher education, so we might profit from using one of the most widely recognized metaphors from fantasy literature-that of the One Ring that rules all other rings of power in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The One Ring in Tolkien's universe is the physical means through which Sauron seeks to exert power in Middle Earth. The rings of power are bound together and were created by Sauron to corrupt and control men, elves, and dwarves. The metaphor can only be extended so far into higher education, but we are intrigued by the idea that the e-portfolio could be considered something akin to the One Ring-the high-impact practice that unites and connects all other HIPs. What is the current status of e-portfolios and HIPs in higher education? How will that status change in the near future? Are e-portfolios another HIP? If students experience multiple HIPs in the course of their studies, would they benefit from also showcasing and reflecting upon them in an e-portfolio? What roles do HIPs and e-portfolios play in assessing essential learning outcomes?
High-Impact Practices in Higher Education
Research supports George Kuh's contention that the following teaching practices are notably beneficial to college students: first-year seminars and experiences, common intellectual experiences, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, diversity/global learning, service learning/community-based learning, internships, and capstone courses or projects. In addition, research suggests that participation in HIPs may also have compensatory effects for underprepared and historically underserved students (Kuh 2008; Brownell and Swaner 2010; Finley and McNair 2013).

When done well-and we should never forget that any high-impact practice can be designed or implemented poorly-HIPs share a set of characteristics that are the ultimate sources of benefit for students. They engage students as active rather than passive learners. To take one example, students engaged in undergraduate research can be actively (re)discovering discipline knowledge instead of passively receiving that knowledge in a lecture. HIPs engage students in relationships with faculty and other students that center on substantive and relevant material. For example, students working on a collaborative project can be asked to negotiate educationally relevant content at the same time that they are negotiating the dynamics of group work. A related feature of HIPs is that students are more likely to work with a diverse set of other people. HIPs also ask students to devote extended time and effort on tasks that are intentionally designed to result in tangible and specific-but unscripted-outcomes. Because of the way they are structured, HIPs frequently provide students with feedback on how well they are understanding concepts or learning new skills. Finally, HIPs tend to ask students to integrate, apply, and synthesize knowledge in meaningful contexts. Think about the demands for integration, application, and synthesis inherent in service-learning courses, internships, and capstone experiences.
E-portfolios as a High-Impact Practice
While evidence grows that effective e-portfolio use correlates with student success and deep learning (see Eynon, Gambino, and Török 2014), they have high impact for a few underappreciated reasons as well. Exploring these reasons reveals some of the characteristic features of high-impact practices more generally, deepening our understanding of what makes these educational practices high impact, and helps show why e-portfolios are potentially the unifying HIP.

The first thing to note about e-portfolios as a high-impact practice is that they are composed. When we say composed, we are referring to the fact that e-portfolios both include writing and are themselves written. Just the fact of writing invites us to consider how e-portfolios might share some features of one key HIP: writing-intensive courses. Writing across courses is itself a valuable activity because writing has been shown to support learning. The National Council of Teachers of English puts it succinctly in Beliefs About the Teaching of Writing (2004): "Writing is a tool for thinking."

In using the term composed we also include the more global decisions students make when they engage in e-portfolio practice. When students compose e-portfolios, they make higher-level choices about matters of order and arrangement. They select which point to address first, second, third, and so on. They build the architecture of their ideas and make decisions about how they want to represent them hierarchically. Students make connections across various assignments and courses and, more importantly, decide how those connections ought to be displayed. We should not dismiss this work as a trivial matter of graphic design and presentation. E-portfolio work shares many of the key characteristics of HIPs as described by George Kuh (2008) in the seminal AAC&U report on HIPs, High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Making compositional choices requires both "time and effort" and a general understanding of how one's work across courses fits together.

When students build their e-portfolios, they also enact a shift from being a consumer to being a producer of their own education. They become learners with agency. When we ask students to represent and reflect on their learning both within and across courses, we go beyond simply requiring another assignment. Instead, we are pushing students to demonstrate their education in ways they haven't been traditionally asked to. In composing an e-portfolio, students do more than represent an educational experience that existed prior to their efforts to capture it. Instead, there is a sense in which students are literally composing their education as they build their e-portfolios. It is in the act of crafting their e-portfolio, in the act of making hard, thoughtful choices, that the educational experience is fully realized.

Asking students to represent their learning introduces another hidden benefit, the so-called "audience effect." Writing in Wired magazine about the benefits of writing and social media (blogging, Twitter, Facebook), Clive Thompson (2009) points to research that shows a "shift in performance when we know people are watching." Thompson defends social media (blogging, in particular) against those who argue that it somehow harms literacy. Literacy scholars like Deborah Brandt point to the fact that we are now a "nation of mass writers." Say what you will about the distractions of social media, the fact is that they require people to write for an audience.

Thompson's argument can help us better understand another high-impact feature of e-portfolios: their visibility. When students publish their portfolios online, they become beneficiaries of the audience effect. By asking students to represent their work beyond the walls of the classroom, we help them wed the e-portfolio's benefits of composing and reflecting with an additional set of expectations that can elevate their performance. Thompson points to work that has "found that the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to pay more attention and learn more." The visibility of e-portfolios pushes students to up their game.

That visibility can influence faculty performance as well. When students represent their work in an e-portfolio, they provide much greater visibility into the work of faculty. E-portfolios shed light on an institution's teaching. Through e-portfolios, entire courses now have an audience of peers. Colleagues can see more than just a syllabus and assignment; they see the most important aspects of the course as it is experienced and executed by students. This new reality should shape our own performance as faculty just as the greater visibility of e-portfolios shapes the performance of students. Work that was once hidden behind the walls of the classroom now has a broader audience. For faculty, this can produce a kind of secondary audience effect.
E-portfolios for High-Impact Practices
Even if, as we contend, e-portfolio pedagogy is itself a high-impact practice, a well-constructed e-portfolio initiative anchored in the curriculum has a unique and beneficial relationship to other HIPs in an academic program or across an institution. Curated electronic portfolios are ideal venues in which to showcase the work that results from student engagement with HIPs. They allow for text to be combined with multimedia representations to create shareable exhibitions that transcend time and distance. As such, they allow student work to escape the confines of a discrete educational event and formally intersect with the broader range of curricular, cocurricular, and life experiences that define what it means to be liberally educated.

Imagine a student who experiences several HIPs in their general education program-a summer bridge first-year experience, a learning community, a study abroad semester-and additional HIPs in their major, such as undergraduate research, an internship, and a capstone course. And imagine that for each of these HIPs the student placed a significant artifact-a work sample produced during the course of the activity-and a written reflection about the experience in their e-portfolio. Over time the e-portfolio would become signature work itself, as it documented the student's engaged learning arc, growing sophistication, and emergence as a reflective practitioner. Moreover, if reflection prompts in the e-portfolio were framed in particular ways, the student could more readily grapple with questions about how the HIPs promoted essential learning outcomes, challenged assumptions about academic work, or spoke to each other across the disciplines.

Batson (2010) has argued that e-portfolios are a "profoundly disruptive" technology in higher education, and indeed they challenge traditional understandings of student-faculty interaction, student ownership of learning, and the closed nature of courses. However, in the world of HIPs, e-portfolios might actually play a unifying and organizing function. They could very well provide the scaffolding upon which HIPs are anchored at an institution and through which HIPs are connected in students' minds. They certainly allow institutions to directly assess the signature work that students produce in high-impact experiences.
Establishing E-portfolios at the Center of the Curriculum
The role we envision for e-portfolios is predicated on their placement at the center of the curriculum. Colleges and universities are figuring out how best to introduce e-portfolios into academic programs. In 2010 Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) instituted e-portfolios as a requirement in all general education courses. Students create one e-portfolio and use it to archive at least one signature assignment and reflection from each general education course. Signature assignments are the kinds of projects, papers, and presentations that are typically found in freshman and sophomore-level courses, but SLCC's General Education Committee insists that they address at least two of the General Education program's learning outcomes. By centering e-portfolios in general education, SLCC has ensured that they are used in its existing first-year experience, service-learning, study abroad, and writing-intensive courses. As the college strives to create curricular pathways rich with HIPs, e-portfolios are already a cultural norm that will help students make connections between those deep educational experiences. And e-portfolios are serving to provide a much-needed integrative force in SLCC's cafeteria-style general education model.

SLCC's approach has led to several important results. The school assesses the e-portfolios of recent graduates using internally designed rubrics, as well as AAC&U's VALUE rubrics, resulting in annual snapshots of student performance on general education learning outcomes. By relying on e-portfolios for assessment, SLCC is able to directly assess student artifacts and reflections as they are experienced in the curriculum, rather than having to overlay an assessment regime disconnected from the curriculum. While the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities had concerns in 2004 about SLCC's lack of assessment in general education, the accrediting body commended SLCC in 2014 for its assessment of general education using e-portfolios. Moreover, the e-portfolio appears to be leading an increased focus on general education learning outcomes across the curriculum. Internal surveys indicate that in the semester before e-portfolios were implemented, 27 percent of students said that they were introduced to general education learning outcomes in the course in which they took the survey, while in a follow-up survey in spring 2014, 63 percent of students said they had been introduced to the general education learning outcomes.

In 2012, Chattanooga State Community College (ChSCC) began its e-portfolio journey to generate assessment data for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools-specifically for a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) called W.E. Succeed: Work Ethic First, centered around promoting the work ethic of ChSCC students. The W.E. Succeed initiative was also a central piece of the work ChSCC launched through AAC&U's Giving Community College Students a Roadmap project. The college selected an e-portfolio platform that could support the diverse academic divisions, student support services, and extracurricular programs in addition to the W.E. Succeed initiative. The college developed a student template, named the Roadmap Template, to serve the dual purpose of introducing each new student to the various campus resources and opportunities for engagement, as well as encouraging the student to practice reflection and self-discovery to impact work ethic and career readiness. Surprisingly, many ChSCC faculty requested the tenure and promotion process be modernized within the e-portfolio platform. This resulted in truly campus-wide e-portfolio development, which encompasses a fully developed student template, a tenure and promotion template for faculty, and a template for staff to showcase their work with potential to support annual review as well. By spring 2015, all 180 full-time faculty were completing their annual reviews digitally, and more than 2,500 students from diverse areas of campus were developing their own personal e-portfolios.

The initial goal of the Roadmap student e-portfolio template was to build support for the W.E. Succeed work ethic QEP, but it has evolved into a robust template that has allowed students to much more easily envision their entire educational journey. With the assistance of customized forms within the e-portfolio platform, ChSCC annually combines and analyzes all student reflections with NVivo software. The resulting analysis identifies key themes and allows the college to document gains in work ethic learning as well as the other student learning outcomes. Below are some of the key work ethic themes that emerged in 2014:

College is hard work, in many cases harder work than expected.

It's important to learn to balance life among school, work, family, and leisure.

Success in courses and programs is preparation for success in future careers, especially in the areas of working well with others and working diligently.

Working well with others means open communication and high levels of commitment from individual team members.

Overwhelmingly, students are connecting their actions and attitudes with their resulting academic success. Many directly credit specific learning activities with improved self-confidence and engagement in the learning process. Reflective writing is helping students naturally make connections between courses, HIPs, advising, student learning outcomes, and career goals, while at the same time providing excellent authentic assessment data to support institutional needs.
Conclusion
In a future world where high-impact practices are strategically located throughout curricular pathways, a well-designed e-portfolio requirement could be the one HIP that serves all the others. By asking students to be the curators and narrators of their education, reflective e-portfolio pedagogy showcases signature work in HIPs, allows institutions to authentically assess student learning artifacts, and ties HIPs together into a whole that is greater than the individual pieces.

Both SLCC and ChSCC have implemented e-portfolios strategically at the core of the student experience, positioning both institutions to use e-portfolio as a scaffold on which to anchor a growing list of HIPs. Both institutions hope to open up and link classrooms in high-impact ways that lead to student ownership of their learning. As SLCC student Matthew Curtis said, when speaking about his experience with e-portfolio, "If our knowledge stays in the classroom, it is useless. But if it travels class to class and to our homes it isn't useless anymore. It becomes alive and effectual in our lives."

References

Batson, Trent. 2010. "A Profoundly Disruptive Technology." Campus Technology 28, July 2010. http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2010/07/28/A-Profoundly-Disruptive-Technology.aspx.

Brandt, Deborah. 2009. Literacy and Learning: Reflections on Writing, Reading, and Society. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Brownell, Jayne, and Lynn Swaner. 2010. Five High-Impact Practices: Research on Learning Outcomes, Completion, and Quality. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Eynon, Bret, Laura Gambino, and Judit Török. 2014. "What Difference Can ePortfolio Make? A Field Report from the Connect to Learning Project." International Journal of ePortfolio 4 (1): 95-114.

Finley, Ashley, and Tia McNair. 2013. Assessing Underserved Students' Engagement in High-Impact Practices. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Kuh, George D. 2008. High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

National Council of Teachers of English. 2004. Beliefs About the Teaching of Writing. http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/writingbeliefs.

Thompson, Clive. 2013. "Why Even the Worst Bloggers Are Making Us Smarter." Wired, September 17. http://www.wired.com/2013/09/how-successful-networks-nurture-good-ideas-2/.

David Hubert, interim assistant provost of learning advancement, Salt Lake Community College; Jason Pickavance, director of educational initiatives, Salt Lake Community College; and Amanda Hyberger, Quality Enhancement Plan director and professor of music, Chattanooga State Community College

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Reflective E-portfolios: One HIP to Rule Them All?

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As colleges and universities embrace high-impact practices (HIPs), we can envision a future-as yet a fantasy world-where they become more common, anchored in curricular pathways and designed to improve the retention and graduation rates of new majority students.

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Association of American Colleges & Universities

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Below is an excerpt from High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter High-Impact Educational Practices: A Brief Overview , by George D. Kuh (AAC&U, 2008).
Chart of High-Impact Practices (pdf)

The following teaching and learning practices have been widely tested and have been shown to be beneficial for college students from many backgrounds. These practices take many different forms, depending on learner characteristics and on institutional priorities and contexts.

On many campuses, assessment of student involvement in active learning practices such as these has made it possible to assess the practices' contribution to students' cumulative learning. However, on almost all campuses, utilization of active learning practices is unsystematic, to the detriment of student learning. Presented below are brief descriptions of high-impact practices that educational research suggests increase rates of student retention and student engagement.

First-Year Seminars and Experiences
Many schools now build into the curriculum first-year seminars or other programs that bring small groups of students together with faculty or staff on a regular basis. The highest-quality first-year experiences place a strong emphasis on critical inquiry, frequent writing, information literacy, collaborative learning, and other skills that develop students' intellectual and practical competencies. First-year seminars can also involve students with cutting-edge questions in scholarship and with faculty members' own research.

Common Intellectual Experiences
The older idea of a "core" curriculum has evolved into a variety of modern forms, such as a set of required common courses or a vertically organized general education program that includes advanced integrative studies and/or required participation in a learning community. These programs often combine broad themes-e.g., technology and society, global interdependence-with a variety of curricular and cocurricular options for students.

Learning Communities
The key goals for learning communities are to encourage integration of learning across courses and to involve students with "big questions" that matter beyond the classroom. Students take two or more linked courses as a group and work closely with one another and with their professors. Many learning communities explore a common topic and/or common readings through the lenses of different disciplines. Some deliberately link "liberal arts" and "professional courses"; others feature service learning.

Writing-Intensive Courses
These courses emphasize writing at all levels of instruction and across the curriculum, including final-year projects. Students are encouraged to produce and revise various forms of writing for different audiences in different disciplines. The effectiveness of this repeated practice "across the curriculum" has led to parallel efforts in such areas as quantitative reasoning, oral communication, information literacy, and, on some campuses, ethical inquiry.

Collaborative Assignments and Projects
Collaborative learning combines two key goals: learning to work and solve problems in the company of others, and sharpening one's own understanding by listening seriously to the insights of others, especially those with different backgrounds and life experiences. Approaches range from study groups within a course, to team-based assignments and writing, to cooperative projects and research.

Undergraduate Research
Many colleges and universities are now providing research experiences for students in all disciplines. Undergraduate research, however, has been most prominently used in science disciplines. With strong support from the National Science Foundation and the research community, scientists are reshaping their courses to connect key concepts and questions with students' early and active involvement in systematic investigation and research. The goal is to involve students with actively contested questions, empirical observation, cutting-edge technologies, and the sense of excitement that comes from working to answer important questions.

Diversity/Global Learning
Many colleges and universities now emphasize courses and programs that help students explore cultures, life experiences, and worldviews different from their own. These studies-which may address US diversity, world cultures, or both-often explore "difficult differences" such as racial, ethnic, and gender inequality, or continuing struggles around the globe for human rights, freedom, and power. Frequently, intercultural studies are augmented by experiential learning in the community and/or by study abroad.

ePortfolios
ePortfolios are the latest addition to AAC&U's list of high-impact educational practices, and higher education has developed a range of ways to implement them for teaching and learning, programmatic assessment, and career development. ePortfolios enable students to electronically collect their work over time, reflect upon their personal and academic growth, and then share selected items with others, such as professors, advisors, and potential employers. Because collection over time is a key element of the ePortfolio process, employing ePortfolios in collaboration with other high-impact practices provides opportunities for students to make connections between various educational experiences.

Service Learning, Community-Based Learning
In these programs, field-based "experiential learning" with community partners is an instructional strategy-and often a required part of the course. The idea is to give students direct experience with issues they are studying in the curriculum and with ongoing efforts to analyze and solve problems in the community. A key element in these programs is the opportunity students have to both apply what they are learning in real-world settings and reflect in a classroom setting on their service experiences. These programs model the idea that giving something back to the community is an important college outcome, and that working with community partners is good preparation for citizenship, work, and life.

Internships
Internships are another increasingly common form of experiential learning. The idea is to provide students with direct experience in a work setting-usually related to their career interests-and to give them the benefit of supervision and coaching from professionals in the field. If the internship is taken for course credit, students complete a project or paper that is approved by a faculty member.

Capstone Courses and Projects
Whether they're called "senior capstones" or some other name, these culminating experiences require students nearing the end of their college years to create a project of some sort that integrates and applies what they've learned. The project might be a research paper, a performance, a portfolio of "best work," or an exhibit of artwork. Capstones are offered both in departmental programs and, increasingly, in general education as well.

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A Brief Overview Below is an excerpt from High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter, by George D. Kuh (AAC&U, 2008). Chart of High-Impact Practices (pdf) High-Impact Educational Practices: A Brief Overview The following teaching and learning practices have been widely tested and have been shown to be beneficial for college students from many backgrounds.

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Quality and Equity in Service to Democracy

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Evidence-Based Improvement in Higher Education

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What does NSSE do?

Through its student survey, The College Student Report, NSSE annually collects information at hundreds of four-year colleges and universities about first-year and senior students' participation in programs and activities that institutions provide for their learning and personal development. The results provide an estimate of how undergraduates spend their time and what they gain from attending college.

NSSE provides participating institutions a variety of reports that compare their students' responses with those of students at self-selected groups of comparison institutions. Comparisons are available for ten Engagement Indicators, six High-Impact Practices, and all individual survey questions. Each November, NSSE also publishes its Annual Results, which reports topical research and trends in student engagement results. NSSE researchers also present and publish research findings throughout the year.

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Through its student survey, The College Student Report , NSSE annually collects information at hundreds of four-year colleges and universities about first-year and senior students' participation in programs and activities that institutions provide for their learning and personal development. The results provide an estimate of how undergraduates spend their time and what they gain from attending college.

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Evidence suggests that the creation of an ePortfolio facilitates meaningful reflection in the learning process, while increasing success in reaching personal learning goals.

This is further supported by the findings of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) report published in 2007 identifying the following benefits of participating in a High Impact Practice like reflective ePortfolios:

Increased persistence & GPA

Deep approaches to learning (richer more lasting connections to materials)

Higher rates of student-faculty interaction

Increased critical thinking and writing skills

Greater appreciation for diversity

Higher student engagement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ePortfolios are the latest addition to AAC&U's list of high-impact educational practices, and higher education has developed a range of ways to implement them for teaching and learning, programmatic assessment, and career development. ePortfolios enable students to electronically collect their work over time, reflect upon their personal and academic growth, and then share selected items with others, such as professors, advisors, and potential employers. Because collection over time is a key element of the ePortfolio process, employing ePortfolios in collaboration with other high-impact practices provides opportunities for students to make connections between various educational experiences.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ePortfolios are the latest addition to AAC&U's list of high-impact educational practices, and higher education has developed a range of ways to implement them for teaching and learning, programmatic assessment, and career development. ePortfolios enable students to electronically collect their work over time, reflect upon their personal and academic growth, and then share selected items with others, such as professors, advisors, and potential employers.

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The associated benefits of High Impact Practices rely heavily on effective implementation. When done well, HIPs include each of the following:

1. Considerable time and effort requirements for students

2. Facilitated learning outside of the classroom (real- world applications and relevance is highlighted)

3. Meaningful interactions between faculty and students

4. Collaboration across disciplines and cultures (experience diversity)

5. Frequent and substantive feedback

6. Reflection and integrative learning opportunities

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Association of American Colleges & Universities

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As colleges and universities embrace high-impact practices (HIPs), we can envision a future-as yet a fantasy world-where they become more common, anchored in curricular pathways and designed to improve the retention and graduation rates of new majority students. At the same time, we see the accelerating adoption trajectory of electronic portfolios (e-portfolios), which suggests that they might also become commonplace in our higher education system. What would the educational landscape look like in this future where HIPs and e-portfolios took prominent places in the lives of students at colleges and universities?

We're speculating in this article about a fantasy world where HIPs predominate in higher education, so we might profit from using one of the most widely recognized metaphors from fantasy literature-that of the One Ring that rules all other rings of power in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The One Ring in Tolkien's universe is the physical means through which Sauron seeks to exert power in Middle Earth. The rings of power are bound together and were created by Sauron to corrupt and control men, elves, and dwarves. The metaphor can only be extended so far into higher education, but we are intrigued by the idea that the e-portfolio could be considered something akin to the One Ring-the high-impact practice that unites and connects all other HIPs. What is the current status of e-portfolios and HIPs in higher education? How will that status change in the near future? Are e-portfolios another HIP? If students experience multiple HIPs in the course of their studies, would they benefit from also showcasing and reflecting upon them in an e-portfolio? What roles do HIPs and e-portfolios play in assessing essential learning outcomes?
High-Impact Practices in Higher Education
Research supports George Kuh's contention that the following teaching practices are notably beneficial to college students: first-year seminars and experiences, common intellectual experiences, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, diversity/global learning, service learning/community-based learning, internships, and capstone courses or projects. In addition, research suggests that participation in HIPs may also have compensatory effects for underprepared and historically underserved students (Kuh 2008; Brownell and Swaner 2010; Finley and McNair 2013).

When done well-and we should never forget that any high-impact practice can be designed or implemented poorly-HIPs share a set of characteristics that are the ultimate sources of benefit for students. They engage students as active rather than passive learners. To take one example, students engaged in undergraduate research can be actively (re)discovering discipline knowledge instead of passively receiving that knowledge in a lecture. HIPs engage students in relationships with faculty and other students that center on substantive and relevant material. For example, students working on a collaborative project can be asked to negotiate educationally relevant content at the same time that they are negotiating the dynamics of group work. A related feature of HIPs is that students are more likely to work with a diverse set of other people. HIPs also ask students to devote extended time and effort on tasks that are intentionally designed to result in tangible and specific-but unscripted-outcomes. Because of the way they are structured, HIPs frequently provide students with feedback on how well they are understanding concepts or learning new skills. Finally, HIPs tend to ask students to integrate, apply, and synthesize knowledge in meaningful contexts. Think about the demands for integration, application, and synthesis inherent in service-learning courses, internships, and capstone experiences.
E-portfolios as a High-Impact Practice
While evidence grows that effective e-portfolio use correlates with student success and deep learning (see Eynon, Gambino, and Török 2014), they have high impact for a few underappreciated reasons as well. Exploring these reasons reveals some of the characteristic features of high-impact practices more generally, deepening our understanding of what makes these educational practices high impact, and helps show why e-portfolios are potentially the unifying HIP.

The first thing to note about e-portfolios as a high-impact practice is that they are composed. When we say composed, we are referring to the fact that e-portfolios both include writing and are themselves written. Just the fact of writing invites us to consider how e-portfolios might share some features of one key HIP: writing-intensive courses. Writing across courses is itself a valuable activity because writing has been shown to support learning. The National Council of Teachers of English puts it succinctly in Beliefs About the Teaching of Writing (2004): "Writing is a tool for thinking."

In using the term composed we also include the more global decisions students make when they engage in e-portfolio practice. When students compose e-portfolios, they make higher-level choices about matters of order and arrangement. They select which point to address first, second, third, and so on. They build the architecture of their ideas and make decisions about how they want to represent them hierarchically. Students make connections across various assignments and courses and, more importantly, decide how those connections ought to be displayed. We should not dismiss this work as a trivial matter of graphic design and presentation. E-portfolio work shares many of the key characteristics of HIPs as described by George Kuh (2008) in the seminal AAC&U report on HIPs, High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Making compositional choices requires both "time and effort" and a general understanding of how one's work across courses fits together.

When students build their e-portfolios, they also enact a shift from being a consumer to being a producer of their own education. They become learners with agency. When we ask students to represent and reflect on their learning both within and across courses, we go beyond simply requiring another assignment. Instead, we are pushing students to demonstrate their education in ways they haven't been traditionally asked to. In composing an e-portfolio, students do more than represent an educational experience that existed prior to their efforts to capture it. Instead, there is a sense in which students are literally composing their education as they build their e-portfolios. It is in the act of crafting their e-portfolio, in the act of making hard, thoughtful choices, that the educational experience is fully realized.

Asking students to represent their learning introduces another hidden benefit, the so-called "audience effect." Writing in Wired magazine about the benefits of writing and social media (blogging, Twitter, Facebook), Clive Thompson (2009) points to research that shows a "shift in performance when we know people are watching." Thompson defends social media (blogging, in particular) against those who argue that it somehow harms literacy. Literacy scholars like Deborah Brandt point to the fact that we are now a "nation of mass writers." Say what you will about the distractions of social media, the fact is that they require people to write for an audience.

Thompson's argument can help us better understand another high-impact feature of e-portfolios: their visibility. When students publish their portfolios online, they become beneficiaries of the audience effect. By asking students to represent their work beyond the walls of the classroom, we help them wed the e-portfolio's benefits of composing and reflecting with an additional set of expectations that can elevate their performance. Thompson points to work that has "found that the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to pay more attention and learn more." The visibility of e-portfolios pushes students to up their game.

That visibility can influence faculty performance as well. When students represent their work in an e-portfolio, they provide much greater visibility into the work of faculty. E-portfolios shed light on an institution's teaching. Through e-portfolios, entire courses now have an audience of peers. Colleagues can see more than just a syllabus and assignment; they see the most important aspects of the course as it is experienced and executed by students. This new reality should shape our own performance as faculty just as the greater visibility of e-portfolios shapes the performance of students. Work that was once hidden behind the walls of the classroom now has a broader audience. For faculty, this can produce a kind of secondary audience effect.
E-portfolios for High-Impact Practices
Even if, as we contend, e-portfolio pedagogy is itself a high-impact practice, a well-constructed e-portfolio initiative anchored in the curriculum has a unique and beneficial relationship to other HIPs in an academic program or across an institution. Curated electronic portfolios are ideal venues in which to showcase the work that results from student engagement with HIPs. They allow for text to be combined with multimedia representations to create shareable exhibitions that transcend time and distance. As such, they allow student work to escape the confines of a discrete educational event and formally intersect with the broader range of curricular, cocurricular, and life experiences that define what it means to be liberally educated.

Imagine a student who experiences several HIPs in their general education program-a summer bridge first-year experience, a learning community, a study abroad semester-and additional HIPs in their major, such as undergraduate research, an internship, and a capstone course. And imagine that for each of these HIPs the student placed a significant artifact-a work sample produced during the course of the activity-and a written reflection about the experience in their e-portfolio. Over time the e-portfolio would become signature work itself, as it documented the student's engaged learning arc, growing sophistication, and emergence as a reflective practitioner. Moreover, if reflection prompts in the e-portfolio were framed in particular ways, the student could more readily grapple with questions about how the HIPs promoted essential learning outcomes, challenged assumptions about academic work, or spoke to each other across the disciplines.

Batson (2010) has argued that e-portfolios are a "profoundly disruptive" technology in higher education, and indeed they challenge traditional understandings of student-faculty interaction, student ownership of learning, and the closed nature of courses. However, in the world of HIPs, e-portfolios might actually play a unifying and organizing function. They could very well provide the scaffolding upon which HIPs are anchored at an institution and through which HIPs are connected in students' minds. They certainly allow institutions to directly assess the signature work that students produce in high-impact experiences.
Establishing E-portfolios at the Center of the Curriculum
The role we envision for e-portfolios is predicated on their placement at the center of the curriculum. Colleges and universities are figuring out how best to introduce e-portfolios into academic programs. In 2010 Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) instituted e-portfolios as a requirement in all general education courses. Students create one e-portfolio and use it to archive at least one signature assignment and reflection from each general education course. Signature assignments are the kinds of projects, papers, and presentations that are typically found in freshman and sophomore-level courses, but SLCC's General Education Committee insists that they address at least two of the General Education program's learning outcomes. By centering e-portfolios in general education, SLCC has ensured that they are used in its existing first-year experience, service-learning, study abroad, and writing-intensive courses. As the college strives to create curricular pathways rich with HIPs, e-portfolios are already a cultural norm that will help students make connections between those deep educational experiences. And e-portfolios are serving to provide a much-needed integrative force in SLCC's cafeteria-style general education model.

SLCC's approach has led to several important results. The school assesses the e-portfolios of recent graduates using internally designed rubrics, as well as AAC&U's VALUE rubrics, resulting in annual snapshots of student performance on general education learning outcomes. By relying on e-portfolios for assessment, SLCC is able to directly assess student artifacts and reflections as they are experienced in the curriculum, rather than having to overlay an assessment regime disconnected from the curriculum. While the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities had concerns in 2004 about SLCC's lack of assessment in general education, the accrediting body commended SLCC in 2014 for its assessment of general education using e-portfolios. Moreover, the e-portfolio appears to be leading an increased focus on general education learning outcomes across the curriculum. Internal surveys indicate that in the semester before e-portfolios were implemented, 27 percent of students said that they were introduced to general education learning outcomes in the course in which they took the survey, while in a follow-up survey in spring 2014, 63 percent of students said they had been introduced to the general education learning outcomes.

In 2012, Chattanooga State Community College (ChSCC) began its e-portfolio journey to generate assessment data for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools-specifically for a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) called W.E. Succeed: Work Ethic First, centered around promoting the work ethic of ChSCC students. The W.E. Succeed initiative was also a central piece of the work ChSCC launched through AAC&U's Giving Community College Students a Roadmap project. The college selected an e-portfolio platform that could support the diverse academic divisions, student support services, and extracurricular programs in addition to the W.E. Succeed initiative. The college developed a student template, named the Roadmap Template, to serve the dual purpose of introducing each new student to the various campus resources and opportunities for engagement, as well as encouraging the student to practice reflection and self-discovery to impact work ethic and career readiness. Surprisingly, many ChSCC faculty requested the tenure and promotion process be modernized within the e-portfolio platform. This resulted in truly campus-wide e-portfolio development, which encompasses a fully developed student template, a tenure and promotion template for faculty, and a template for staff to showcase their work with potential to support annual review as well. By spring 2015, all 180 full-time faculty were completing their annual reviews digitally, and more than 2,500 students from diverse areas of campus were developing their own personal e-portfolios.

The initial goal of the Roadmap student e-portfolio template was to build support for the W.E. Succeed work ethic QEP, but it has evolved into a robust template that has allowed students to much more easily envision their entire educational journey. With the assistance of customized forms within the e-portfolio platform, ChSCC annually combines and analyzes all student reflections with NVivo software. The resulting analysis identifies key themes and allows the college to document gains in work ethic learning as well as the other student learning outcomes. Below are some of the key work ethic themes that emerged in 2014:

College is hard work, in many cases harder work than expected.

It's important to learn to balance life among school, work, family, and leisure.

Success in courses and programs is preparation for success in future careers, especially in the areas of working well with others and working diligently.

Working well with others means open communication and high levels of commitment from individual team members.

Overwhelmingly, students are connecting their actions and attitudes with their resulting academic success. Many directly credit specific learning activities with improved self-confidence and engagement in the learning process. Reflective writing is helping students naturally make connections between courses, HIPs, advising, student learning outcomes, and career goals, while at the same time providing excellent authentic assessment data to support institutional needs.
Conclusion
In a future world where high-impact practices are strategically located throughout curricular pathways, a well-designed e-portfolio requirement could be the one HIP that serves all the others. By asking students to be the curators and narrators of their education, reflective e-portfolio pedagogy showcases signature work in HIPs, allows institutions to authentically assess student learning artifacts, and ties HIPs together into a whole that is greater than the individual pieces.

Both SLCC and ChSCC have implemented e-portfolios strategically at the core of the student experience, positioning both institutions to use e-portfolio as a scaffold on which to anchor a growing list of HIPs. Both institutions hope to open up and link classrooms in high-impact ways that lead to student ownership of their learning. As SLCC student Matthew Curtis said, when speaking about his experience with e-portfolio, "If our knowledge stays in the classroom, it is useless. But if it travels class to class and to our homes it isn't useless anymore. It becomes alive and effectual in our lives."

References

Batson, Trent. 2010. "A Profoundly Disruptive Technology." Campus Technology 28, July 2010. http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2010/07/28/A-Profoundly-Disruptive-Technology.aspx.

Brandt, Deborah. 2009. Literacy and Learning: Reflections on Writing, Reading, and Society. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Brownell, Jayne, and Lynn Swaner. 2010. Five High-Impact Practices: Research on Learning Outcomes, Completion, and Quality. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Eynon, Bret, Laura Gambino, and Judit Török. 2014. "What Difference Can ePortfolio Make? A Field Report from the Connect to Learning Project." International Journal of ePortfolio 4 (1): 95-114.

Finley, Ashley, and Tia McNair. 2013. Assessing Underserved Students' Engagement in High-Impact Practices. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Kuh, George D. 2008. High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

National Council of Teachers of English. 2004. Beliefs About the Teaching of Writing. http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/writingbeliefs.

Thompson, Clive. 2013. "Why Even the Worst Bloggers Are Making Us Smarter." Wired, September 17. http://www.wired.com/2013/09/how-successful-networks-nurture-good-ideas-2/.

David Hubert, interim assistant provost of learning advancement, Salt Lake Community College; Jason Pickavance, director of educational initiatives, Salt Lake Community College; and Amanda Hyberger, Quality Enhancement Plan director and professor of music, Chattanooga State Community College

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Reflective E-portfolios: One HIP to Rule Them All?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As colleges and universities embrace high-impact practices (HIPs), we can envision a future-as yet a fantasy world-where they become more common, anchored in curricular pathways and designed to improve the retention and graduation rates of new majority students.