As part of a class on portfolios and learning, I looked into Hampshire College, which, before its recent closure, built its educational model around student-directed learning, reflection, and portfolios. While not perfect, they’re a great lesson on alternative assessment methods.
If Olin were to take inspiration from Hampshire, I would use their learning model as a set of learnings about how portfolios can support student ownership, reflection, and demonstration of learning, while still building something uniquely Olin.
Our project-based curriculum creates a strong foundation for portfolios. Projects give students a meaningful problem to encourage learning, while the portfolio demonstrates their competency.
We already use portfolios to showcase our work for applications, but class projects often don’t make the cut. Many students instead favor large-scale personal work and project teams, which seem to provide more opportunity for deep learning, integrating disciplines, and developing an engineering mindset.
Bearing this in mind, I think we should use a small number of large, intentional projects for learning, assessment, and portfolios. We then use small projects as opportunities to practice and validate critical skills.
I would follow this path to design a successful education using portfolios:
1. Define competency. Decide what skills students need to earn their degree. Ensure this meets ABET requirements and Olin’s educational philosophy.
2. Define evidence. Decide what portfolios must demonstrate to prove successful learning and competency to internal and external audiences.
3. Design the projects. Identify project-portfolio pairings for each degree that require students to learn and demonstrate the desired competencies. Size projects to give students enough time to deeply engage with the problem, bridge disciplines, iterate, and produce something substantial.
4a. Provide direction. Give students a project goal, constraints, recommended resources, and a mix of group and individual support, while leaving freedom in how they approach the problem.
4b. Use just-in-time instruction. As students encounter a technical problem, provide the necessary mini-lecture, example, or resource and then have them apply it.
4c. Allow ownership. Encourage self-directed pacing and learning, with guardrails to ensure necessary technical competencies are still developed.
4d. Track individual learning. For group projects, require students to document their own design decisions, analysis, implementation, testing, failures, and contributions. Pairing students with different majors could also encourage interdisciplinary work and natural delegation.
5a. Assess competence. A portfolio entry should demonstrate skills through clear design choices, research, and (maybe) calculations. A clean final product isn’t enough to demonstrate learning.
5b. Preserve external legibility. Use the portfolio assessments to create subject-specific grades (Linear Algebra, Statics, Design Thinking, etc). This would make easy to understand transcripts for applications.
6. Iterate projects and requirements. Ask whether students developed the intended competencies, whether their portfolios provide convincing evidence of those competencies, and whether employers or graduate schools can understand and use that evidence. Update the projects as needed.
Instead of just another assignment, portfolio entries can be a tool we use to demonstrate the depth of our skills and the extent of our capabilities.
The opportunity isn’t to make portfolios work. It’s to make the work worth a portfolio.
