Portfolio? What’s in a name?

The word portfolio, from the Latin portare (“to carry”) and folium (“sheet”), was originally used for the case in which an artist kept his/her best artwork, intended to showcase future employers the versatility of his/her work, i.e. examples to illustrate the artist’s capabilities.

Nowadays, portfolio is used more generically for a collection of acquired or realized elements: a (financial) investment portfolio, a customer portfolio … In education, portfolio refers to the material collected by a student to illustrate the efforts, progress and achievements.

Portfolios in Toledo

In the learning environment Toledo, there are two portfolio applications, each with its own very different approach. The portfolio application that comes with the Blackboard software (Blackboard is the name of the commercial software platform behind Toledo) is closest to the standard definition of a portfolio: a collection of gathered information. The Blackboard portfolio is a so called documentation portfolio.
Because portfolios are often used to monitor/adjust the evolution and the development of a student, which is not easily done using the Blackboard Portfolio application, the Toledo team has developed its own portfolio application in which the emphasis is on monitoring and feedback. This application is launched under the working title My Portfolio.

“Blackboard’s” portfolio

The figure below schematically shows the idea of the “Blackboard” portfolio, one of the two portfolio applications in Toledo.

The setup is best understood as a mini website where the student can easily add pages, subsections…. On these pages, the student describes the collected materials, while the actual documents are uploaded into an underlying repository. Advantages of this application are:

• The structure of the website and / or the underlying documents folders can be enforced through a template, while the student still has sufficient possibilities to organize the material as desired.
• Students can share their portfolio with both internal and external supervisors. These persons have read access to the portfolio and can provide feedback using the portfolio comment page.

“Blackboard’s” Portfolios are easy to use (and to monitor), and are ideal for use in those situations where the emphasis is on collecting and documenting. On an annual basis, there are about 17,000 in Toledo student portfolios of this type.

Toledo portfolio “My Portfolio”

Portfolios are often used in the context of higher learning tasks that are an essential part of the development of the student, for example medical training, teaching portfolio, physiotherapy … Observation, reflection, feedback and adjustment are in these cases crucial.
Therefore, in October 2010 an OOF project was started by different Association KU Leuven partners to define the outlines of a portfolio tool built on the concepts of self-reflection, monitoring, review and evaluation. In 2012, this OOF project resulted in My Portfolio, an in-house -Toledo team developed- portfolio system. Future developments and requests for changes are controlled by a feedback group of Association KU Leuven portfolio specialists.

As in the Blackboard portfolio, also My Portfolio is a student centered application, but the approach is totally different:

• Student assignments are much more strictly outlined through predefined tasks (web forms or competence forms).
• Feedback is given at entry level (opposite to comment on portfolio level) which allows for a closer monitoring and / or guidance.
• Web forms and competence forms are by default multi­ attempt, essential for the student to reflect on the own skills and abilities.

The following video clip (Dutch only) shows an impression of instructors who incorporated My Portfolio in their education.