Written By: Lindsay Malcolm, Product Marketing Specialist
In the realm of online education, ePortfolios have become essential tools for showcasing student work, nurturing reflection, and facilitating meaningful learning experiences. Brightspace ePortfolio and Portfolio tools both offer seamless integration with other features within the Brightspace platform, creating a unified learning environment for educators and students. Despite sharing similar goals, these tools possess distinct features and functionalities tailored to different user needs.
As of January 2024, Brightspace Portfolio is intended to eventually replace Brightspace ePortfolio, and it is not recommended to use both tools concurrently in the same course.
In this article, we delve into the comparative analysis of Brightspace ePortfolio and Portfolio tools, exploring their use cases and benefits.
Portfolio
Brightspace Portfolio is a tool that empowers learners of all ages to independently capture evidence of learning. Learners can maintain their digital portfolio year after year, as they progress through their learning journey.
ePortfolio
Brightspace ePortfolio is a personal portfolio tool for storing, organizing, reflecting on, and sharing items that represent your learning.
ePortfolio vs Portfolio: Use Case Parity
Use Case | Feature | ePortfolio | Portfolio |
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Capture learner centric evidence of progress over time | |
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Ability to share evidence with others (differences in the 2 tools enable learner role to do this) | Peer or Internal User Sharing & Feedback |
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Demonstrating learning growth over time in relation to learning outcomes/program outcomes | Program Learning Outcomes |
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Give/get feedback on learning journey | Instructor Feedback (written comments, private notes, shared faculty notes, outcome alignment) |
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Self-reflection for learner/ employee upskilling journey | Learner Reflections (audio & written) |
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Categories for classifying evidence (tagging to classify and store it the way you want in ePortfolio. You create collections) | Evidence Tagging |
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Higher Ed Use cases where Portfolio Adoption is not possible and why:
- Students collect and curate learning objects over time and capture it into a template and that bundled presentation can be submitted to a course assignment folder (multiple evaluators etc.)
- Ability to internally and externally share artifacts of learning
- Ability to reflect on learning in a rich format (for example, text, audio, or video)
- Accreditation use case – Collect sample artifacts of learning that are associated to a learning outcome, bundle the sample student work, and submit to the accrediting body
Gaps between ePortfolio and Portfolio
ePortfolio features that Portfolio is lacking | Portfolio workarounds |
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- Easily share evidence of learning (including externally to Brightspace)
- Peer feedback available
- External advisor feedback available
- Store evidence outside of the course: Students can share artifacts to MyDesire2Learn.com and store up to 2gig of artifacts, collections, presentations and collections for free
- Curation and organization of items from multiple courses into a single space to showcase their best work
- Create items inside Portfolio
- No template/formatting structure
| - Export one item at a time (screen grab whole page or download item), for purposeful sharing. Example: “choose five of your most valuable pieces vs taking the whole thing.”
- No peer feedback in portfolio, redirect to video assignment for peer feedback
- Can also create discussion threads for peer feedback using groups tool
- CPD tracker can be used in lieu of portfolio for corporate use cases, evidence can be exported as well
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Why switch to Portfolio now?
- Create learner-centered digital portfolios
- Use age-appropriate modes of the mobile app to collect evidence of learning
- Provide formative assessments and real-time feedback
- Record audio and video reflections about a learner's work
- Use Brightspace Portfolio year-over-year to reflect a learner's growth and showcase their work
- Simple archival of evidence
- Easy to use QR codes
- Easily align evidence of learning to outcomes (standards or expectations)
- Funster mode for learners who are not reading ready
- Share with parents and guardians by using Brightspace Parent & Guardian
- Security and privacy – keeps it safe for teachers to document learning moments involving students under 18
- Categorizing evidence (classify evidence based on requirements of school or organization)
- Upload one piece of evidence to multiple students
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