Course Portfolio Definition

Perhaps the best way to ensure that quality teaching is recognized, valued, and rewarded is to improve the means of identifying and documenting teaching effectiveness. Course portfolios afford a comprehensive yet efficient means of documenting the intellectual work of teaching a particular course. Through such a portfolio, faculty members document the design and execution of a particular course, including results in student learning. In this way, teaching can be understood and presented as a form of scholarship, utilizing the accountability through peer review that already exists in higher education. A course portfolio can be used useful as an instrument for to exhibit teaching effectiveness, a crucible for cultivate scholarship, and a vessel for convey one’s work to appropriate publics, including promotion and tenure committees. Much briefer than a traditional teaching portfolio, a course portfolio might contain:

• A statement of course content and goals
• A plan for accomplishing goals
• Data collected to demonstrate student achievement of those goals
• A reflective narrative on the relation among the above three elements

What Might Be in a Course Portfolio?—Some Possibilities

• Instructor profile
• Description of course content
• Description of students
• Place of course in curriculum
• Personal teaching philosophy
  
• Course goals and objectives (This and other parts might be in syllabus.)
• Class schedule
  
• Teaching methods (lecture, labs, discussion, projects, etc.)
• Resourcesærequired readings, web sites, etc.
• Mechanisms used to evaluate students
• Course history and evolution
• Student course evaluations
• Recent changesæWeb, new approaches, etc.
• Research on the course (single year, multiple years)
• Human subjects permissions (where obtained)
• Personal reflections
• Student reflections, student portfolios
• Future plans for the course
• Advice to others
• Conceptual map of relationships among the parts

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