Who's Portfolio is it Anyway?

With the rise of virtual instruction and Learning Management Systems (LMS) students are putting more and more content online. Gone are the days of running to the campus bookstore to buy a clear cover for your paper and turning it in at your 8am Monday class. Am I aging myself here a little bit? In my undergrad we did have a LMS where we could check grades and occasionally some professors would have us turn things in, but for the most part we were still in a hard copy world.

I remember doing a case study on a student at a lab school who has probably long since graduated high school, but I created a whole scrapbook about her and my practicum experience. Would you believe that I moved that thing from house to house for over 10 years because I had worked so hard on it? When I finally took it out of my keepsake box the glue had failed and it was falling apart.

As students are putting more and more online be it on Seesaw, Canvas, Google Classroom, or a website like this one, the question becomes, "Who does the work belong to?" My initial reaction is, "Uhm, duh! The student!" But think about when a student moves out of the district (or an employee for that matter... I don't even want to talk about moving my nearly 500gb of Google Drive files when I changed districts... so I won't.) The data is deleted or put into some sort of quarantine or holding for a period until Technology just deletes it. Students loose access to their portal so therefore cannot log into their platforms and all of their work is just gone in an instant. If these scenarios are the case, can we really say that students "own" these things? So when work is hosted on a site like this one, we can more confidently say that the work belongs to the student. Right?

The question then becomes are we talking about where does the work physically reside? If so, then I suppose if within a traditional LMS, no it doesn't belong to the student. Once he or she graduates or leaves the institution it often times goes away or at a minimum is inaccessible to the individual.

But let's play around with a different school of thought for a moment. If the portfolio is created outside of school or organization resources and students are given ownership and opportunities to develop their own ideas about topics and put their own spin on their responses, then yes, I do believe that they are fully owning that ePortfolio. They are owning their learning and learning process. After all, that is one of the main benefits of the ePortfolio, when properly used, they can take students learning deeping and make it much more meaningful (Thibodeaux et al., 2017, p. 9).

We are half way through the first session of classes within the ADL path at Lamar and I am really starting to see that it is about the journey or the process more than the destination or final product. This is a big mindset shift for me. I am one who wants a checklist and specific steps and directions, so I've had to grow and stretch myself in ways I was not expecting from this program.

If you are reading this, chances are you are in some type of postgrad or learning experience yourself. I challenge you to take ownership of your learning and don't miss this scenery along your route just trying to get to your destination. 😊

Thibodeaux, T., Cummings, C., & Harapnuik, D. (2017). Factors that contribute to eportfolio persistence. International Journal of EPortfolio, 7(1), 1–12.