Luke Fernandez
The advent of online technology has introduced new tools for promoting and measuring student progress toward the goals of general education. One tool that has been heralded by many universities as particularly powerful in this regard is the eportfolio. This tool allows instructors to set up online repositories that parallel the general education goals which instructors want students to realize in their courses. For example, if an instructor is teaching a course in a discipline that deals with normative questions, the instructor could encourage his students to contribute material to a repository that documents their efforts to develop refined and defensible ethical reasoning. At some schools the portfolio is used across the entire curriculum so that the student is encouraged to contribute to a set of repositories that span all of the goals of general education. When deployed in this fashion, the tool helps the student to understand the relationship between different disciplines and the way that these disciplines are connected through the goals of general education.
While eportfolios have been leveraged effectively at many institutions they aren’t received favorably at all universities or by all instructors. By deploying eportfolio in a number of courses, the research project will identify the extent to which this technology can contribute to general education at Weber State. Key questions we will ask include: How does the technology need to be deployed and configured at Weber State so that students can understand the coherence of and relationships in the general education program? Does the eportfolio perform equally well for faculty in different disciplines? ( For this reason we will be piloting the portfolio across a few disciplines and programs including FYE, Honors and Social Science Gen Ed courses ). Finally, what are the incentives and disincentives for wide scale adoption of eportfolio technology at Weber State?