Associate Dean Marshall

"One of the best things about the web-based ePortfolio™ in general is how flexible and elastic and infinitely revisable it is. It allows the user to take things out, put things in, add to a particular item, subtract from a particular item, and then immediately share what she’s done with anybody who cares to look.”

“Our students can actually begin to build an ePortfolio™ from the moment they arrive on campus; with their earliest work they can establish the basic framework and as they grow in their research, service and teaching, they can add things, delete things, and sharpen the focus of the ePortfolio™.”

“I was very excited actually to hear about the ePortfolio™ Project because I saw immediately that it had a lot of possibilities for students with a clinical focus. The students in counseling psychology, in school psychology, and even maybe educational psychology perhaps have different career paths than an academic career; an ePortfolio™ will allow them to organize their clinical work in a way that presents it for employers. It helps them monitor their achievements toward their degree and build their confidence as they accumulate artifacts that they know will be valuable for internships and for their employers.”

“For students who are beginning their program I think when they compare themselves to more experienced students who have a lot of clinical contact, they tend to get a little discouraged and they think well, I’ll just never get there. But with an ePortfolio™ they have categories they can fit their experience into; they have goals that they can reach in terms of what types of experiences they want to have. They can actually use the ePortfolio™ as a planning device for different kinds of experience that fit the different categories. I think for them it will be a confidence booster.”

“For students who are interested in clinical careers, I think the most important artifact is clinical experience and so what they might well keep track of are various kinds of interventions that they have learned to deliver, certain client populations that they have worked with and different kinds of agencies where they’ve had experiences. Sometimes when we think about clients we think about just individual clients, but many of our students do workshops, they do outreach programs, they might do groups, psycho-educational interventions, and those are also artifacts that can be included. And particularly, I think there’s the possibility of having taped workshops as long as the client confidentiality is protected. A student could be seen delivering a psycho-educational intervention on back pain or on a school refusal to parents and that would be very exciting to have that in the ePortfolio™.”

“Prospective students can be directed to a sample Portfolio that’s available on site; they can see what kinds of artifacts students accumulate while they’re in the program. They can become familiar with what I see as a very exciting tool both for managing doctoral studies and then for searching for internships and then eventually employment. I think for our prospective students it would just add to the quality that they already expect to be here at The University of Iowa.”

"When the doctoral professional ePortfolio™ came up, I was truly excited about it and encouraged our students in our department to get involved with it because I really think it creates a wonderful matrix to organize the artifacts that the students develop through the course of their four to five or more years of doctoral studies here.”

“Most of the graduates of our doctoral program go on to academic positions and they do need to demonstrate their capacities and their achievements in the areas of teaching, research and service, as those are the areas that search committees will be looking at and those will be the areas in which their ultimate tenure in an academic institution will be judged.”

“The ePortfolio™ helps them right from the start .It’s one way of checking in with themselves on an annual basis. In our programs we require students to have an annual review and to facilitate that they must give us information about their plans as well as accomplishments in the areas of teaching, research and service. As they’re going along they can develop the Portfolio whether its uploading artifacts of their products regarding class papers and projects or samples of their clinical work either in terms of direct work with clients or the case plans and conceptualizations and found reports, it does provide a nice framework and structure.”

“In developing a paper portfolio it’s highly likely that artifacts will get lost and/or need to have much time dedicated to finding them, organizing them and ultimately seeing what there is. I think it can come as a surprise when somebody has been busy in one arena and then goes back at the end of a timeframe and notices much to their surprise and chagrin that they are missing and or are low in terms of some important areas that should have been considered earlier in their doctoral program.”

“I think the structural organization and the hands-on inputting of materials into the ePortfolio™ allows the person to reflect on what they have done. We talk about the reflective practitioner and the importance of stepping back and looking at what you’ve done and making meaning out of that. It’s a very critical process -- when the meaning is made and the artifacts are viewed in totality, I do think a sense of confidence grows from that and I think confidence is another characteristic of our students that distinguishes us from our peer institutions.”

"One of the great things about working with doctoral students as an advisor is that you stay with them through the whole course of their tenure here on campus. So I’d actually start working with our students on the ePortfolio™ from the moment they began their work on our campus.”

“I’d ask them to establish the web site, I’d ask them to establish some very simple categories, and then every semester as their coursework unfolded, as their teaching developed, I’d ask them to decide on the artifacts that represent their best work. The notion is that the definition of best work would evolve over time but certainly I would ask them to start collecting artifacts from their teaching so this is something we’ve got a lot of experience in but I would ask them to collect their syllabi, samples of their students writings, samples of their own assignments, maybe even samples of classroom discussion they might pick up on with video tape. Anything that will help tell the story of how they’ve taught and how they’ve learned to teach better.”

“With my own students I intend to make sure they go to ePortfolio™ workshops right away so that they understand the tools they have to work with and how easy they are to use even for students who may not have the technical skills when they first arrive at graduate school. As a department chair I fully intend to have workshops for doctoral students every year. I’ve had wonderful feedback from students who attended ePortfolio™ workshops who said they feel like they have a tool that they can use, that will help them organize a variety of activities and artifacts. As Department chair too, I’ve got a student I’m working with who I believe will develop a sample Portfolio that will illustrate his very unique interests in social justice; for example, this student has been involved in a clinical capacity and a research capacity at the homeless shelter in Iowa City and has very strong career interests in social justice and multiculturalism. I think the ePortfolio™ is flexible enough to let students with a wide range of interests present them in an organized and exciting way.”

“We encourage students in counseling psychology (and I know other programs do as well) to develop a focus. Certainly within their doctoral program there are many possible areas of focus; for counseling psychology which is what I know best, a student can focus on multiculturalism or on health psychology or neuropsychology and those areas of focus are quite different. I can see different kinds of artifacts being put in an ePortfolio™ that would represent a student’s professional identity so that the ePortfolio™ actually serves as a defining tool as well as an organizing tool.”

“For job searches, it will be incredibly convenient for everybody concerned. But one of the most important things to keep in mind is that nationwide searches for faculty are very time intensive - that students put a lot of work into their dossier which they send out to a university and then the university has to make a very serious decision when they decide who to invite to campus.”

“The more information students can provide, the more specific information they can provide, the more likely it is that they are going to make good decisions about bringing people to campus. After that, it is up to the student to make the case on the basis of interviews, and job presentations and things like that.”

“But the important thing is getting to campus and this is where the ePortfolio™ provides an enormous advantage. Because not only do you provide more information, richer information, more complete information, but you provide it in a format that demonstrates a technical competence which anybody working in a university now knows you need.”

“Doctoral students with an ePortfolio™will have better than a competitive edge. Again, it’s going to be an amazing advantage to our students because it provides much more information in a user-friendly way and in a convenient format and carries with it the clear indication of technical skill.”

“I think search committees would find the ePortfolio™ a very exciting way to get to know a candidate before the interview process. Thinking about a clinical student applying for a clinical position, the search committee might have listened to this student talk about his or her theoretical orientation, might have seen some clips of the student at work, might have viewed treatment plans, might have looked at outcome data, might have gotten a better sense of the agencies at which the student had been working. All of that together would give the search committee more information than a student could possibly convey in an interview and would really prep the search committee for some very specific questions for the student that would let the student document much more clearly how he or she fits the agency where they are interviewing.”

“Most students, when they apply for clinical jobs, are just as limited as students applying for academic jobs. Typically, they send a resume and a resume might list locations where they have had clinical experience and a couple of bullet points about what they’ve done. But with an ePortfolio™ a student can include outlines of workshops, examples of treatment plans without identifying information about a client but still good information about the treatment plan, outcome data about how the student has done with clients, different types of empirically supported treatments the student has mastered, various agencies where the student feels that he or she has had expertise and those can all be linked together in a way that an agency can really go explore the ePortfolio™ and get a sense of the breadth of the students experience.”

“The search process is a competitive process and the extent to which individual candidates distinguish themselves from the rest of the applications draws positive attention. It also draws a certain sense of ‘I’m curious about what this person has to say”. In the day to day performance of work in the academic arena and in research technology is very much the way the work is done; through the act of preparing an ePortfolio™ the student earns additional skill in the area of technology that will enhance their workability in these organizations. The ePortfolio™ is a distinguishing factor from the get-go; it also makes a statement that this person is sophisticated and knowledgeable in the arena of technology.”

“Here at the University of Iowa the Graduate College in conjunction with the Center for Teaching has created another new initiative that will distinguish those students who choose to participate in it. The new teaching certificate requires a series of courses followed by a year-long practicum in college teaching. The final act for the certificate is to create a portfolio that documents preparation of a syllabus and examinations, course grade distributions and other products the student may have in addition to their final classroom evaluations. In a very simple way, the ePortfolio™ accommodates all of that and it’s a direct hit for the requirements of the new teaching certificate. I encourage all of our students to participate in that because going into any academic institution whether a teaching institution or a research institution – teaching will be required.”

Mike,
a second-year doctoral student

"There are a couple benefits for the ePortfolio™ as a new doctoral student. To begin with it helps me to organize my experience here at Iowa into the three categories of teaching, research and service. I can look at my strengths and weaknesses and my interests and from that I can see what I want to specialize in or what I feel is a good future for me.”

“For a new doctoral student I can start organizing from the beginning so I wont’ have to go back and save – resave things.”

“I just completed my prospectus meeting and have approval to go ahead with my dissertation. As I’m finishing my doctoral program I’m just beginning the ePortfolio™ process. It would have been enormously helpful if I’d had the opportunity to use this from the beginning of my doctoral program.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time rounding up different artifacts and looking for papers and actually having to recreate things that would have been readily available if I’d had the ePortfolio™.”

"I’ve been at Iowa for the last four years teaching, working as a research assistant for a DVD project, a teacher of literature practices, and also doing my own research. Now I’m entering my 5th year. I knew this would be coming – that this would be my last year and how was I going to bring it all together. I wanted to teach this year and I knew I was going to be in a job search and I’m finishing my dissertation and then I was flabbergasted by how I was going to manage all of this.”

“I had done some portfolio work with children when I was teaching elementary school. Of course, they were paper portfolios. Then I came to Iowa and saw the ePortfolio™ project starting with my undergraduate students and although they were oftentimes in angst over the ePortfolio™ project, I could see the benefits of it, how efficient it was to put everything in an electronic file for prospective employers to look at even when they are trying to decide if they are interested in me.”

“Working through the process of putting the ePortfolio™ together, I did a lot of thinking about the past (what has my teaching been) and some thinking about the future (what kind of teaching excites me).”

“In telephone conversations I’ve already had with prospective employers when they ask me what kind of courses I’ve taught and what I think my strong points are, I can just tell them to open the ePortfolio™ and look at it – it’s right there. In qualitative research that I’ve been doing you try to see patterns across work—seeing patterns in my ePortfolio™, I’ve become more aware of my own patterns.”

“When I got involved with the ePortfolio™ I met people in the Educational Placement Office and I’ve had huge support here in writing my vitae, in working on my application letter and in every step of the ePortfolio™ process. I also got very involved with the people in the College’s Technology Center. I cobbled together the funniest looking ePortfolio™ you’ve ever seen and then got the support from people in the ePortfolio™ lab.”

“I think one great advantage of the web is the format to display portions of my work completed here at Iowa. I’ll want to share those things that best represent me--the reflections on the experiences I’ve had. More specifically, looking at the teaching folder I’d want to put the syllabi I’ve developed and my teacher evaluations--I could scan in my Ace forms.”

“I would also like to include some of the student work from a teacher’s standpoint. I would identify exemplary projects that students have developed asking their permission and eliminating their names. Student work would give a very clear example of what the students have done with me as a teacher.”

“It was a little bit difficult to decide what sort of artifacts I wanted to put in the ePortfolio™. I was not terribly organized and I had folders of things and I initially thought who would want to see that paper that I wrote or whatever even though I did well on it. I’ve come to understand that a prospective employer might want to see another example of a scholarly paper to see how I write. I teach micro counseling to the master’s students which is an experiential counseling interview practice-type class. I could have examples of role-plays that I’ve done or have my students give a counseling interview and I could point out the important parts.”

“I have student evaluations on the Ace forms where they’ve both filled in the bubbles about how they felt I performed as an instructor and then wrote comments on the back. I’m proud of my teaching and I could scan the Ace forms into the ePortfolio™ where someone might see what my students had to say about my performance.”

“Other artifacts that I might include are copies of papers I’ve had published. Publishing is very important for a lot of schools; I’ve had four papers published and that would be something I probably would want to showcase in the ePortfolio™.”

It’s very important for the ePortfolio™ to contain my philosophy of education and also my philosophy of supervision--people need to know what they’re getting in a new job applicant. I need to elucidate for myself my philosophy in these areas by formally writing out my philosophy and reviewing it and changing it as my needs and ideas change. This gives me the opportunity to look at what I’ve said about my philosophy and to make sure that it is reflected in my teaching agenda and my supervision agenda.”

“My ePortfolio™ includes my curriculum vitae, my teaching philosophy, my research agenda, and my teaching agenda. In addition I have still pictures of my teaching and I have a string of video that is an example of my teaching and when you look at the video you can see my collaboration with students, you can see my work with other colleagues at the university, professors that I’ve worked with. You can also see my teaching pedagogy. Under my scholarly presentations I have many examples of different kinds of presentations that I’ve done throughout my career even going back as far as when I was in a public school setting and including papers I’ve written, PowerPoint presentations, handouts I’ve given out at national conferences and other kinds of transparencies or tools that I’ve used during my presentations.”

“I spend a lot of time dialoging with students on their work; I write comments to them and they write comments back to me. I wanted an example of a student paper that had been written as a final draft paper so I wanted people to be able to look at my ePortfolio™ and see my comments on the final draft piece. I don’t think I included any earlier kinds of commentary but it’s on-going throughout the semester and it’s an important part of my teaching.”

Mike,
a second-year doctoral student

"Another use of the ePortfolio™ is in my annual reviews as a doctoral student. At those times I sit down with my faculty advisor and we review the progress I’ve made and some of the specific work samples included in the ePortfolio™. My advisor will give me advice on which ones he thinks highlight my skills the best and suggest ways I can improve.”

"My advisor thought the ePortfolio™ was a wonderful idea to help me to organize things and help me in a job search. The technical support that has been given here has allowed me to make a nice looking product. The process is repetitive after you learn how to put things in there so I can actually go in and change things or adapt things myself when the whole process seemed to be a mystery at first. It’s not difficult and my advisor is thinking now it’s a pretty nice tool to have and to carry with me.”

Nita,
in the final stage of the doctoral program

“I think there will be a clear advantage when I go on the job market. When employers are looking at me as a possible candidate--one they might want to invite on campus--the ePortfolio™ offers them a way to look clearly at what I’ve done and to look at the rich information in a quick, efficient way.”

The ePortfolio™ will be excellent for a job search; I don’t have to take a hard copy with me because I have the URL of my web space. Everything that I have is in there; I don’t have to choose or try to anticipate what the interviewers will want to see. Everything that I’ve done and everything that I would like to show prospective employers is right there in the ePortfolio™. Nothing to lose on the airplane, nothing to ‘oh, I left that at home.’ You don’t have a stack of paper to try to organize in a way that the employer wants because they can choose where they want to go -- they can look at my research agenda , they can look at what I’ve done in teaching -- everything is there at a click of a mouse. Potential employers would be impressed with the professional quality of the ePortfolio™, how nice it looks and how well it represents my accomplishments.”

"In my job search right now, it’s much more exciting for me to pick a school because I’m not hesitant about gathering the materials I need. Different applications require different kinds of information and it’s all located right in my ePortfolio™. I can go to my ePortfolio™ and just click on what I need for the application and either print it on my printer, or make note of it in my application letter so that they’ll go to my ePortfolio™ and take a look at it there. It’s been wonderful.”

“I’m finding that many search committees are looking at teaching background so they love seeing the video and looking at the different syllabi that I’ve attached to the agenda that I laid out in my ePortfolio™. They’re also oftentimes asking for an example of my scholarly work so I can send a paper that I’ve written and then I can show the list of presentations that I’ve done at national conferences. And I seem to have gathered up many more presentations than I have publications so the nice thing for me is to think about the presentation work going into a publication eventually and they see my intention there – they see my scholarship.”

“Right now there are a lot of job openings in my field. I’ve probably sent 17 or 18 applications out and I’ve had a good response. The applications all ask for just a little different information so I find myself with my ePortfolio™ open and my printer hooked up and I say Okay, first we do the vita for every single one. Then this one wants a scholarly paper about this. This one wants an example of my teaching interests. So I can pull up the web page and get it right off that section of my ePortfolio™ and then I just stack it. Typically, what I’ve done is send three or four of them at a time and I use the ePortfolio™ as my organizational tool to get that done. The application letter is the final thing that I do. I look at the stack that I’ve created from my ePortfolio™ and those are the things I mention in the letter.”

“The ePortfolio™ has been a time saver. Last night I probably got the entire application ready for the University of Minnesota in about 5 minutes which is about all the time I have right now for this. I don’t tell an employer that I can get everything organized in a few minutes--I mean it’s a little embarrassing because you can get it ready pretty fast.”

"The ePortfolio™ has also served as a confidence booster. It’s allowed me to collect the work that I’ve done in one central location and makes me feel good that I have it all right there so that when someone asks I can pull it out and show them.”

“An added benefit of the ePortfolio™ is the process. My interaction with other departments and support services here at Iowa helped me fine tune my CV and other work samples.”

"I can look at the ePortfolio™ that I’ve created and see the articles that I’ve published, see the service that I’ve performed, and see the comments from my students. I feel that I have accomplished something in my program here and it’s really a confidence booster.”

“What an organizational tool it is! The ePortfolio™ is a filing cabinet full of stuff. It’s just a wonderful organizational tool for me in particular. I’m organized but it’s taken care of everything for me. I feel much better about that.”

“The ePortfolio™ process and project has allowed me to collaborate with a lot of different people at Iowa. When I begin as an assistant professor, I will have a better understanding of the structure and where different departments and people fit in. Sometimes, as doctoral students, we are kind of put in our offices and we are working alone so this has been a great way to collaborate with other people and get a better idea of the larger community and its resources.”

I absolutely will keep it up to date and will keep using it even when I’m no longer at the University of Iowa. The organizational system that exists in the template can be used anywhere. I can change the categories to something else that’s more appropriate for my new university. I think the ePortfolio™ would be beneficial for annual and tenure reviews. I would always be able to put things into the ePortfolio™ as they are completed or as they happen so I can continue to have a dossier of my experience and what I’ve done. If I should happen to move from that university to another one I would still have available everything that I had done.”

"ll continue to use the ePortfolio™ when I have web space at my new university. It will be the way to continue to keep track of what I’m doing with my teaching, the courses I’m going to offer in the future. I’ll use it almost as a marketing tool that will allow students to see what I’m teaching next semester.”