This year’s NY/NE Regional ePortfolio conference, Re-Bundling Higher Education: High Impact ePortfolio Practice and the New Digital Ecosystem, was co-sponsored by Pace and CUNY and held at Guttman Community College. The event explored the changing role and impact ePortfolio is playing in the future of higher education.
The two-day conference held in early March featured over forty presentations and a student showcase starring twenty-two students from ten campuses including Pace. Over two hundred people attended across the two-day event. In addition to Pace, presenters and attendees came from fourteen CUNY campuses, six SUNY campuses, Columbia, and NYU — but also from a wide range of other colleges and universities, as far east as Madrid and Dublin, as far west as Portland and Vancouver, and many places in between, including Penn State, Bucknell, Pratt, Quinnipiac, Mercy College, and Florida International University.
Breakout sessions focused on ways ePortfolio is being used in the following areas: Pedagogy, Professional Development, Advisement, Assessment. Additionally, presenters shared valuable insight and best-practices. Discussions included how ePortfolio initiatives advance reflective and integrative social pedagogy for ePortfolios that aims to build student learning and help students author new identities as learners.
One faculty shared how she, along with the collaboration and support of her Academic Technologist and Study Abroad Office, had her students use ePortfolio to document their experience in a faculty-led travel course to provide a more holistic approach to learning. The instructor incorporated templates into the course ePortfolio and students posted reflections, videos, photos, and site reports as a scrapbook of their travel course experience. At another session, the speaker discussed how institutions can use frameworks on ePortfolio to help students connect credentials for advising purpose.
