An Experiment with Student Portfolio Management

[This is a guest post by Jim Cracraft, an Assistant Director at Vanderbilt University’s English Language Center (ELC), which offers English language support to individuals who have a first language other than English. He can be reached through the center’s website: http://vanderbilt.edu/elc/]

One of the final assignments in a business writing course I teach involves having students write an action plan based on an assessment of their writing over the course of the semester. They create portfolios with the items they’ve written, reflect on the progress they’ve made and identify areas for growth. The last few times I’ve taught this course, I haven’t been completely satisfied with how I’ve handled all of the file management on my end, so this semester I’m trying something different. And because this course is offered through our graduate school of management, I thought this might be a good opportunity try to up my own file management game! This may change in the future, but this year, I have taken over the management of their portfolios.

Box as a Solution

I am basically a file-and-folders guy and a long-time loyal Dropbox user, so it surprised me somewhat that Box (formerly Box.net) won me over, but when my university started offering 50GB Enterprise accounts on Box, this was a logical choice for work-related files. At that point, I decided, as much as possible, to keep school stuff in Box and personal stuff in Dropbox. Before I explain the set up, I’ll lay out my criteria for a portfolio management system.

It should:

• be free

• be fairly easy to set up and use

• offer sufficient storage

• allow for downloads of individual files as well as entire folders

• allow students to view marked up papers (with tracked changes/comments) directly in the browser, as illustrated by this image (Click to view full-size version):

  

• stream video files (Click to view full-size version of image):

  

• not require students to create yet another account, or sign up for additional services

• not require students to fiddle with permissions, etc.

• not take me much time to manage

So far, Box has met my needs, but to make it work for student portfolios, a bit of front-end work is required at the beginning of the semester. Now last semester is over and down with, I can report that things have gone pretty smoothly and the set up was minimal.

Moving beyond “E-mail me your assignments”

For those of us teaching writing intensive courses, how to handle the collection, organization, and sharing of student work can be challenging. I want students to be able to easily upload homework to me, easily find the graded/marked versions of those documents once I’ve graded them, and have access to a portfolio—all of a semester’s work—via one (private) link. For some classes, they may need to be able to view videos of their presentations as well. It seems pretty simple, but a nice solution has been elusive. E-mail has been the default for many instructors. It is easy just to say, “E-mail me your homework.” What comes after, however, can be messy. E-mails come in at different times, sometimes without the attachment (!), subject lines are not standard, there can be questions in the body of the e-mail that need to be answered, and the attachments need to be extracted from the e-mail and filed somewhere locally and then returned to the students once they are graded, usually also via e-mail. This is always such a headache. Those large video files can be tricky to store and share, too.

A host of websites exist for creating portfolios, and blogging and microblogging platforms can also be used for this purpose as well. Most seem geared at making content look pretty with the ultimate purpose being public display—they are not so much aimed at facilitating information collection and management. Then there are services that are built for collaboration and sharing, like Google Docs, that don’t really suit my needs either. If your school has a learning management system (LMS), that may work, too, but I haven’t tried ours for this purpose. I will say that the Box experiment this semester has worked well for me and my small class of very busy professional students. Those who are looking for a platform that allows students to showcase their work and gives them control of its management/appearance might want to look elsewhere, though. Moving on to the set up.

Initial Portfolio Setup/Organization in Box

• Create an “Assignments” folder in Box

• Create an uploader to embed on a website or have students use the Box-specific e-mail address that sends everything to this folder. Everything students submit now goes into that one folder. No more retrieving attachments from e-mail (use whatever file naming convention that makes sense for you). Dropbox used to rely on 3rd party add-ons (Filestork, dropittome) for this but now has a similar feature built in:

  

• Create a class “Portfolio” folder in Box

• Within this folder, create one subfolder for each student in the class.

• Set folder permissions to give those with the link access, get the private url for each subfolder and share the private portfolio link with each student (I make a copy of their papers and let them know that their original papers will be there as well as the graded versions. I append the word “graded” to the original file name, that way students see both the original and the marked up versions).

Once all this is done, everything that comes into my Assignments folder should be a class assignment that needs to be marked. From there, I move marked assignments to the individual student’s portfolio folder. I like to pin the folder containing all of the portfolios to the dock so I always have easy access to all of the folders from my desktop (Click to view full-size version of image):

This saves me from having to navigate through the browser interface of Box. It also makes it painless to add new files, say a graded copy of an assignment, to a portfolio without having to log in via the web portal, wade through the web interface, and navigate to the folder I want. The students can instantly see whatever is added to their individual folders, too. This will also hopefully make it easy for them to access all of their files via their portfolio link and complete their final action plan assignment. Once the semester is done, I’ll archive the class folder and have a neat, organized portfolio for each student. Overall, I’ve been pleased with the increased efficiency with which I’ve been able to collect, organize, and share student work.

How do you handle the collection, organization, and sharing of student work for your classes? Let us know in the comments!