ABSTRACT
The University of Waterloo's Competency Portfolio project helps students to connect their learning experiences in a variety of different contexts—academic, workplace, and community—to demonstrate competency in a given domain or set of domains. Increasingly, universities are reviewing their programs for relevance and the provision of skills to ensure that their curricula align with the competencies outlined by professional societies. Beyond changing curricula to better address the professional competencies requiring a breadth and depth of critical strategic knowledge, including a strong foundation of accounting knowledge, the people need evidence that such curricular change is actually producing graduates with the desired competencies and qualities. However, saying or writing that skills have been acquired is different from documenting those abilities; electronic portfolios allow students to provide the documentation demonstrating their competencies. Indeed, the authors are most interested in learning whether eportfolios assist in or facilitate changes in student behavior around the development of the competencies the people are trying to cultivate.
