ABSTRACT
Bowling Green State University (BGSU) began implementing academic enrichment programs to improve student learning, including living learning communities and enhanced first-year programs; especially for these programs, documenting student learning outcomes is important. In the late 1990s, the assessment committee began to consider eportfolios as a means for documenting student learning and outcomes. The assessment committee found the learning matrix of the Epsilen system to be an especially valuable feature—it is a two-dimensional grid for organizing uploaded artifacts, thereby providing a shared collection of evidence together with a common vocabulary for discussing progress, assessing learning, and describing student development. As a participant in the ePortConsortium and an early adopter of the Epsilen software, Bowling Green wanted to explore ways to document student learning longitudinally and across all programs. The findings show that eportfolios may serve as a key tool for documenting student learning as defined by grades, number of credit hours earned, and persistence.
