The digital or electronic portfolio, also known as the cyberportfolio, consists of a personalized online document, created by students, either individually or collectively, over time, based on their work, achievements, reflections (e.g., their progress), and comments (e.g., what they’ve learned), produced within the framework of a course. The digital portfolio has many benefits for students. Namely, it sensitizes them to the quality of their learning strategies, helps them self-regulate, and lets them monitor their progress. In addition, it allows teachers to view the many projects that demonstrate what students have learned, makes it possible to give regular feedback, and keep track of individual differences.
Resources to innovate
In this article, the authors present a comprehensive overview of the digital portfolio (definition, goals and uses, advantages of the digital medium) and explain how this tool can be integrated into a teaching practice (e.g., setting objectives, outlining how it will be used, choosing a specific tool). They also provide several examples of digital portfolios created by students at the college level and provide more than 20 references and additional resources for further reading.
In this paper, which addresses the practices and challenges of remote evaluations, the author dedicates a section to the digital portfolio. She explains the different ways in which it can be used, along with its goals within the framework of a summative evaluation. She also refers to several inspiring studies and experiments carried out in the Quebec college network and elsewhere in the world.
This practical sheet about the digital portfolio presents eight insightful sections with answers to questions teachers may have about this tool. The first section describes the digital portfolio, how it works, why it’s interesting, and who might benefit from using it. The second section outlines what the digital portfolio is not, potential problems, aspects teachers need to pay special attention to, and student and teacher perspectives of the dark sides of the digital portfolio when the tool is used inappropriately.
In this video, two teachers from Collège Sainte-Anne explain why and how the digital portfolio is a great way to assess students enrolled in art courses. This tool presents a number of advantages, including the ability to evaluate students individually by looking at traces of their work throughout the learning process, a space where students can document what they’ve learned in a more organized fashion, the ability to share the fruits of their labour with their peers and teachers, and the opportunity for teachers to interact with and evaluate students entirely online. The author also shares tips on how to successfully implement a digital portfolio approach.
In this webinar, the speakers outline the principles of the digital portfolio (definition, advantages, types, execution, evaluation, and feedback) so that it may be used in preschool, elementary school, and high school teaching contexts. Several examples are presented and various models can be downloaded using the digital toolkit made available to teachers on the site
In this article, the authors write about their experience implementing a digital portfolio platform in the framework of two university teaching training programs (bachelor’s degree in secondary education and a short post-graduate program in higher education pedagogy) using the six-step process devised by the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) (e.g., analyzing the practice, assimilating the knowledge, designing the change, implementing the change, evaluating the change, communicating the change). They also share the results of a qualitative study they conducted with students in both programs regarding their perception of the portfolio, their learning experience, and prospects for future use in a professional context.
In this article, the authors introduce a special issue of a publication that focuses on digital portfolios in higher education, i.e., in CEGEPs as well as colleges and universities in Quebec, Canada, and Europe. They discuss thematic angles such as using the digital portfolio to teach skills throughout the duration of a program, using the portfolio to assist and assess teachers in training who are completing a practicum, and critical examination of the portfolio as a high-impact learning practice.