1. Background: Educational and Career Outcomes for Arts: New Paradigm Project

From 2015-2108, the Faculty of Arts mounted a project called "Educational and Career Outcomes for UBC Arts Students: Towards a New Paradigm." The objective was to help students connect their academic activity to their awareness of and preparation for the transition to their career. Eportfolios were a crucial piece of the puzzle, becoming a real keystone for this project's objectives. However there were technology challenges and they were too rooted in courses. A better solution was needed.



2. Rationale for Eportfolios

At many points, the project teams have had to clearly articulate the rationale for the use of eportfolios. The benefits have been argued and researched for many years around the world, but students and faculty are generally unaware of why eportfolios can be so valuable.



4. Working with Programs for ePortfolio adoption

We worked with programs that were targeted as having curricular and professional aspects well-suited to the use of ePortfolios. These included: the Bachelor of Media Studies, the Master of Library, Archival, and Information Science, the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program, and the Geography Department.
But this strategy had both benefits and pitfalls.



5. The Limits of Curricular Integration of Eportfolios

5. Some proponents of eportfolios suggest that the goal is an eportfolio culture in terms of (program) curriculum and (faculty) course design. We see limits to growth if curricular integration is the primary strategy and objective. The obstacles are huge and the outcome may backfire in terms of students' feelings of the value of an eportfolio and their continued use of one.



6. Strategy for Student-Driven Eportfolio Service

Our goal was to build a free service that students could use immediately on arrival at UBC and take with them and use free forever. The foundation of the service design would be that students would recognize this as something that they own, build, and deploy as they wish. We intentionally divorced it from any particular program's use of the service.



7. Technical and Functional Design of ubcarts.ca

The design of the Arts eportfolio service was a balancing act. On one hand, we wanted a system with a low cost of ownership (build and maintain) and sustainable at current resource levels. On the other we knew that students wanted something simple but with modern, appealing design and some flexibility on design elements. We solved this with a highly customized Wordpress multiuser theme, with all the elements labelled appropriately for eportfolios.



9. User Adoption

We would like to report fine-grained statistics on user adoption and use. What we have right now is users' site creation date and total number of Learning Activity posts as they accumulated over time.



How did we build this in a Faculty?

A number of factors came together to enable this to be created in a relatively small IT unit in a Faculty rather than a whole university. Indeed, these kinds of projects rarely get going at a university because of the diversity of stakeholders that must be brought on board. We had keen sponsors, two separate funding sources, visionary participants, and the right mix of roles.