College careers go online

The question, inevitably posed by parents or employers, has inspired dread in generations of students at liberal arts colleges.

What exactly did they learn in four years of study?

Until recently, seniors and new graduates have struggled to answer, overwhelmed at the prospect of describing a complex personal journey. But for a growing number of college students, the response is simple: They e-mail relatives and recruiters a copy of their electronic portfolio, an online repository with links to grades, papers, extracurricular projects, even essays by the students reflecting on personal growth.

Dozens of campuses across the country have created ''e-portfolio" programs for students in the last five years. A regional consortium, the New England ePortfolio Project, has 22 member campuses including Brown, Dartmouth, Tufts, Northeastern, MIT, Mount Holyoke, Lesley University, and the universities of Rhode Island and Connecticut. Most use electronic portfolios in some way on campus, or plan to implement them by mid-2006. In Massachusetts, Simmons College and Framingham State College are poised to roll out broader portfolio programs for use by more students this fall.

At the first meeting of the regional consortium a year ago, organizers had to turn people away after 150 would-be participants showed up, said Trent Batson, an English professor at the University of Rhode Island who has spent several years researching the e-portfolio movement.

''It's one of those silent revolutions that people outside education aren't aware of," he said.

Students in college art and writing courses have long stockpiled work in paper portfolios, giving themselves and their professors a way to gauge their progress over time. Electronic portfolios are designed to capture a student's college experience much more broadly, campus leaders said, by allowing artifacts from an entire college career to be collected in one location.

On some campuses, the main purpose of the portfolios is for academic advising. Advisers can track students' progress through their portfolios, using posted material to pinpoint academic needs and offer guidance. Elsewhere, portfolios are managed by career services staff, and are used primarily to help students assess their strengths and interests, and seek related experience, as preparation for the move into the workforce.

But the surging popularity of e-portfolios also reflects a deeper concern about today's students: Raised in an achievement-oriented culture, and pushed to expand their resumes with constant activity, many have had little practice at reflecting on the meaning and value of achievements, several campus observers said.

''We're dealing with a generation of students that grew up in the Nike era of 'just do it,' but we'd really like them to think about what they're doing, too," said Kathryn Doughty, associate director of career services at Dartmouth, where a two-year trial run with e-portfolios recently ended. ''What we've been seeing at colleges is students with wonderful backgrounds, who can't articulate what they've done or how it relates to their next step."

New students at Framingham State will start setting up their portfolios this summer, before they arrive on campus; early on, they will be asked to write reflective essays about their past leadership and community service experience, college officials said. One goal is to help them understand, right from the beginning, the purpose of the liberal arts education, college dean Suzanne Conley said.

''Sometimes they don't understand how the pieces fit together," she said. ''This will show them what to expect."

Because it encourages students to make connections between class work and extracurricular activities, by asking them to consider broadly what they're learning, e-portfolios push students to see education as a constant process, instead of something confined to the classroom, said Batson. And when students collect and post their work, he said, a subtle shift takes place in the classroom dynamic.

''Students arrive at college and they think the teacher owns English. They're like visitors in someone else's land of learning," he said. ''When the student puts his own work on the Web, it's much more clear they own the work. That makes the professor a visitor in their land."

For many students, e-portfolios feel like a natural next step in lives that are already Web-centered, but some may still need to be persuaded that the project's benefits are worth the extra work.

As an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota at Duluth, Jolene Hyppa Martin was less than thrilled when she was told to build an online portfolio. The requirement seemed, at first, like ''one more hoop to jump through, one more thing on the to-do list," said Martin, 34, who is now pursuing her doctorate at the university's Twin Cities campus.

But after two years of collecting material related to her major in communication disorders, she began to see the portfolio as a useful tool, with its handy links to sample reports she had written and video clips showing her at work in therapy sessions. She continued building her portfolio as she earned a master's degree; now, she said, adding links is second nature, though it's not required by her latest degree program.

''When it's done right, it's a tool and not a task," she said. ''It's a way to get real-life feedback from professors, to share experiences and have more of an exchange, rather than just taking tests and being a number."

Angela Meuse, an incoming freshman at Framingham State, had never heard of e-portfolios before her college orientation this summer.

''I thought it was a pretty cool idea," she said, ''because keeping track of paperwork, and even dates of volunteer work, is hard."

The trend is not limited to colleges, Batson said; portfolio proponents are also pushing educational archives that start in grade school. In Minnesota, he said, the state has offered e-portfolios to all residents, and 30,000 people have signed up so far. Canadian leaders want all their citizens to have e-portfolios in progress by 2010.

The fast acceleration of the trend on US campuses is attributed in part to pressure from accrediting bodies, who use student e-portfolios to assess the success of academic programs, according to specialists.

At Framingham State, food and nutrition professor Janet Schwartz said the portfolios will also help curriculum advisers review and fine-tune lessons to better prepare students. By studying groups of portfolios pulled at random, professionals in various fields will be able to give the college valuable feedback about how well assignments are preparing students for jobs, she said.

At Simmons, where students in the honors program will begin building portfolios this fall, instructional designer Gail Matthews-DeNatale said the technology helps students identify gaps in their learning, make connections between courses, and demonstrate their value to employers.

Oh, yes, and show distant family members what they've been up to for the last four years.

''One of the first things students want to do is send links to parents," she said.

Jenna Russell can be reached at jrussell@globe.com.