RAPPORT
Volume 3 Issue 1 (2018)
Unfortunately, just changing the envelope
was not enough to sustain the portfolio
system. Faculty and administration came
to see it as costly (it required a full-time
administrator to track submissions) and
an impediment to graduation. In the
Spring of 2014, encouraged by the
administration, the faculty voted to
suspend the portfolio system. However,
portfolio had been such a part of our
identity that the faculty did not want to
lose it entirely. Thus, the committee that
oversaw the portfolio, the Board on
Academic Standards, was charged with
coming up with an optional, credit-
bearing replacement.
Designing the Atlas Program
The principles of Design Thinking
(d.school, 2010) were employed by the
committee as it worked to come up with a
new approach to ePortfolio use at
Manhattanville. 2 Interviews were held
with current students, alumni, faculty, and
staff to learn what they found most useful
about the portfolio process and what was
frustrating and off-putting. A recent article
by our team in the International Journal
of ePortfolio describes this process in
detail (Carson, Hannum & Dehne, 2018).
Key questions the committee considered
included:
● How might we provide credit for a
portfolio?
2
Design Thinking is most frequently associated
with Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute
of Design, known as the “d.school.”
● How can we support the practice of
reflection?
● How can we make reflection and the
collection of artifacts useful,
meaningful, and relevant to students’
experiences?
● How can we support the process of
students taking ownership of their
academic and career choices?
The issue of designing something credit-
bearing immediately made clear that we
would be designing a course or courses.
During the 2014-15 academic year, the
Atlas Program gradually took shape. It
quickly also became clear that a solid
program could help to change the
narrative regarding career readiness for
liberal arts students. At this point, in the
late spring of 2015, the College received
an invitation to apply for a grant from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The
proposal needed to engage technology in
support of liberal arts learning. Our Atlas
Program was a perfect candidate, and
we were successful in obtaining a two-
year $100,000 grant to support the
development and roll-out of the Atlas
sequence of classes; the title of our
successful grant application was
Reflection as the Path to a Liberal
Education: Strengthening the
Manhattanville Portfolio Tradition.
The model we came up with was a four-
course program:
● Passport - a revamped existing
transitions course for freshmen,
intended to acclimatise students to
college life and begin reflective
learning;
● Pathfinder - for sophomores, largely
to explore possible majors;
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