In Fall 2017, UFV launched its Bachelor of Arts (BA) 2.0. Along with several other changes, this revamped BA program included a new requirement for BA students to complete an ePortfolio.
When the ePortfolio is complete, according to UFV, students will have an online catalogue of important projects and experiences from throughout their education, which they will have connected to UFV’s nine predetermined Institutional Learning Outcomes (ILOs). The four elements of an ePortfolio, according to UFV, are a biography, the artifacts included (e.g. a research paper or a group project), reflections on those artifacts and the relationship of each to a specific ILO, and “identity.”
UFV encourages students to include these ePortfolios in applications to grad schools and jobs, and to use the process of reflection as a way to assess how well their learning matches up with the ILOs. At first, students were required to take four arts portfolio classes, intended to teach them how to make their portfolios and reflect on their learning experiences, with the first classes running in Fall 2017. This number has since been reduced to two as of Fall 2019.
The university justifies the ePortfolio requirement in part by framing ePortfolios as something to show to prospective graduate programs and employers. The idea that an employer would be interested in reading multiple essay-length personal reflections about how students learned to communicate effectively or do research for a paper is, in most cases, completely out of touch with reality. While an employer might care about employees’ abilities to learn and grow, the skills that an employee is bringing to the table are much more relevant to the hiring process than how they acquired them.
The only possible value of the ePortfolio requirement is that students might learn how to communicate their skills, or might be able to explicitly identify new skills after reflecting on projects they’ve found challenging. However, this possibility is completely undermined by the fact that students are required to connect their projects to predetermined learning outcomes. Students can not reflect freely on the value of their experiences because they have to worry about doing it to meet a set of criteria that are being uniformly applied to every single BA student at UFV.
The aforementioned ILOS are: demonstrating information competency, analyzing critically and imaginatively, using knowledge and skills proficiently, initiating inquiries and developing solutions to problems, communicating effectively, pursuing self-motivated and self-reflective learning, engaging in collaborative leadership, engaging in respectful and professional practices, and contributing regionally and globally. These are all things that students should expect, and be expected, to learn as a matter of course in university. The ability of a student to meet the basic learning outcomes of an arts education should be reflected by their GPA, not a glorified scrapbook that they have to pay two classes’ tuition to make. Forcing students to tell UFV how good of a job it’s doing at teaching them the absolute basics is redundant at best, and self-congratulatory on the part of the university at worst.
Not only is UFV offloading the work of evaluating whether BA students are being supplied with these fundamental skills onto the students themselves (in a way that guarantees a positive answer), but they’re forcing them to pay to do it. ePortfolios are a waste of students’ time and money which serve the university far more than they can be expected to serve students, and the requirement to create one should be lifted from the Bachelor of Arts program.
