Macaulay Honors College is the honors college of the City University of New York. Created in 2001 to attract students with strong academic skills and backgrounds to the City University, Macaulay currently has over 2000 students enrolled. Macaulay students apply and are accepted to the honors college at a specific campus (one of eight). So Macaulay students have (at least) a dual academic identity. They are students at (for example) Brooklyn College or Lehman College, and they are also Macaulay Honors College students.

The consortial structure of Macaulay means that there is limited central requirements or mandate for students work, including assigntments, assessments and curriculum. Students have 100s of different majors, with different requirements, and the bulk of their experience is on their campuses, with faculty drawn from those campuses who have no contact with or knowledge of Macaulay or its programs or goals.

Macaulay students start the program with very strong academic skills from high school, as measured by SAT scores (average is —-), high school averages (average is —) and extracurricular and co-curricular experiences. They also tend to be highly motivated students (that’s how they got to be honors students) who will do what they’re assigned to do and are strongly competitive and achievement-focused.

In terms of a common academic experience, all the students take the same series of four interdisciplinary seminars in their first four semesters. These seminars, The Arts in New York City, The People of New York City, Science Forward, and Planning the Future of New York City, are the only shared curriculum for all students. Even in the seminars, however, the faculty are not centrally selected or oriented, and their commitment to the common or shared quality of the seminars varies widely.

However, all the seminars also share another common element. They are all supported by Instructional Technology Fellows (ITFs), CUNY doctoral students with strong teaching experience and skills, and with experience in using digital technologies to enhance teaching and learning. While faculty also vary in the degree to which they collaborate with their ITFs, the ITFs provide a powerful resource for supporting students and faculty alike.

So when I came to Macaulay in 2005, I met this situation where there were some serious obstacles to implementing a structured and well-defined eportfolio program. We didn’t have a structure in place where we could ask all students to complete a certain task or set of tasks. We couldn’t easily use eportfolios for overall assessment of the program or the students accomplishment of learning objectives. We couldn’t set up lists of items or specific types of artifacts we would require all stduents to include, or rubrics for assessing those groupings.

This particular context required an eportfolio platform that could be open to modification—not just in style or appearance (although that was important—more about that below), but in overall structure and architecture. And because we couldn’t be sure where (what kinds of classes) or who (what kinds of students and professors) or when (at the beginning of a college career? At the end? All throughout?) it would be used, we couldn’t afford to invest a large amount of resources, financial or human, into a platform that might not go in the direction we thought it would.