By Emily Cook, TLS staff writer
In his fourth-year engineering course, Professor Jeffrey Erochko says cuPortfolio is not only changing the way students learn, but also the way they are assessed.
Erochko is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carleton. His course, High Performance Building Design, consists of an interdisciplinary capstone project that has professors and students from three different departments come together to design a building. But with so many students from different disciplines working on a group project, Erochko says assessment is a big challenge.
“We have to be creative how we assess individual students for their work,” he says.
Traditionally, Erochko says giving full consideration to students’ work was difficult because they only had used 15 minutes in an oral assessment to determine the scope and quality of their work.
When they heard about cuPortfolio and its capabilities, the team of professors decided to use the tool to simplify and enhance their assessment process.
“We saw immediately that [cuPortfolio] would be a really great opportunity to be able to allow the students to show, in a more complete sense, what the work they’ve done is,” he says.
The student portfolios themselves aren’t graded, Erochko says, but are used as a tool for students to prove their mastery of the material.
After a set deadline, the professors review the portfolios and formulate feedback before the students present their work. This allows the professors to use the oral assessment time to clarify aspects of the work discussed in the portfolio and ask specific questions instead of having to cover everything. At the oral assessment, rather than bringing in physical artifacts, students can now use a tablet to show their work.
Another benefit to cuPortfolio that Erochko says he and his team found is that they could structure the tool around their rubric, so students know exactly what’s expected.
Erochko says students quickly catch on to how cuPortfolio benefits them, not only in the course itself, but for its potential to be shared with future employers.
“Most of them put quite a lot of effort into making something, not only that contains the artifacts, but also that looks nice,” he says. “It’s obvious to them that it helps to showcase their work, and they’re interested in showcasing their work because they want to be recognized for their work.”
In future, Erochko says cuPortfolio has potential to be used for program-level assessment so students could graduate with evidence of skills they’ve learned throughout their degree.
For now, he says even having this portfolio to take from the course is a huge benefit.
To find out more about Erochko’s experience with cuPortfolio, watch the full interview below. You can also watch interviews with other instructors on the cuPortfolio instructor peer support site.
Below is a list of time codes related to the start of a new question in the video. You can jump to a new topic by moving the video time bar to the respective time codes.
5:54 – How did you assess student portfolios?
6:32 – So your students do not receive a grade for their ePortfolio. Do you find that they still take it seriously?
6:58 – Did you create a template for students in cuPortfolio? Was it helpful?
7:29 – What advice do you have for an instructor who is thinking about using cuPortfolio in their teaching?
8:28 – What value does cuPortfolio add for your students?
9:47 – Do you think cuPortfolio would be useful for program-level assessment?