In a large public research university with very little top-down influence on program design and practices, it is an immense challenge to get instructors to build activities and assessments centred on eportfolios. This project was able to find one or two instructors in a given program to do so. While certain department heads and curriculum chairs were very keen on the idea, they appear to have no desire to push their colleagues to make any changes to their course design or teaching practices.
It was tempting to see each course-based instantiation of eportfolios as a success. But even this relatively concerted and well-resourced project got to so few courses that students exposed to eportfolios as a course requirement would have that exposure in at most three courses and most commonly just one.
In a Faculty of Arts there are few incentives for professors to actively consider students' career readiness. There are only a couple of programs with the professional accreditation imperative to showcase student work.
And the learning management system is the dominant form of electronic assignment submission, so faculty consider another electronic submission as complicating and onerous.
We therefore turned our strategic attention to students themselves. How can we market this tool to students directly, so they see the value, feel ownership of it, and use it beyond the classroom and beyond their time at UBC.
We learned stuff we should have known about how hard it is to impose or even encourage faculty to change their course designs.