Founded more than a century ago as a teacher training school, East Carolina University (ECU) is now the third largest higher ed institution in North Carolina with approximately 5,800 faculty and staff serving nearly 30,000 students. ECU’s commitment to excellence has remained a key tenet of the institution’s framework for preparing generations of learners to become reflective education professionals. Dedicated to the empowerment of all learners in all aspects of educational decision-making, ECU’s College of Education (COE) places particular emphasis on assessment, technology, and research.
With this in mind, the COE didn’t simply step up to the challenge when the North Carolina State Board of Education (SBE) introduced electronic portfolios as a criterion for all teacher licensure programs across the state. Instead of viewing the new ePortfolio requirement as a mandate, the COE’s Office of Assessment & Accreditation (OAA) took advantage of the opportunity to improve its teacher preparation programs by strategically implementing a more comprehensive approach to student learning assessment.
The third largest university in North Carolina, East Carolina University serves a student population of nearly 30,000 across nine undergraduate colleges, a graduate school, and four professional schools. The university offers 16 doctoral degree programs, four first professional degree programs, 76 master’s degree programs, and 102 bachelor’s degree programs. The oldest school on campus is the modern-day College of Education, and ECU recently renamed the Office of Assessment & Accreditation to the Office of Assessment, Data Management & Digital Learning to better reflect the support they provide to their campus community today.
Initially, ECU piloted the folio platform officially approved for Banner-SunGard schools. However, they soon found that some of its limitations posed longer-term challenges to institutional goals outside of teacher licensure. The OAA wanted a broader solution that would also enable institutional leadership, faculty, and staff to collect, manage, reflect on, and retain student work and related assessment data long after the immediate ed prep requirement was met.
The OAA decided to request a formal exemption from the Provost in order to find a more powerful, scalable platform that would address several critical assessment initiatives:
| After rigorously evaluating potential platforms’ ability to meet these larger goals, the OAA decided to adopt Taskstream by Watermark™. The powerful ePortfolio assessment capabilities would enable the OAA to improve how they tracked students’ progress through programs, assessed teacher candidates’ performance, and evaluated the effectiveness of its many ed prep programs throughout the university. |  |
Working closely with a dedicated Implementation Specialist, the OAA allocated time and resources to building the structure and framework of portfolio templates to support a range of uses across all teacher licensure programs on campus. This high level of flexibility enables departments to tailor their use of portfolios in alignment with specific program needs, including:
In addition to successfully addressing the State’s teacher licensure standards, the COE’s implementation and expanding use of Taskstream by Watermark has enabled ECU to align assessment and accreditation efforts across departments, strategically revise its approach to measuring and improving program quality, and engage faculty and students in meaningful, sustainable ways.
Using ePortfolios and data collected in Taskstream by Watermark, ECU has been able to confidently prepare for both specialized and regional accreditation.
Beyond the rigors of accreditation, the COE has seen considerable success leveraging Taskstream by Watermark to gain valuable insights that guide critical research, validate change, and drive improvement.
Taskstream by Watermark gives all ECU students the ability to create personalized ePortfolios with helpful pack-and-go features. These highly customizable portfolios make it easy for students to organize and showcase their work, allowing them to reflect on their learning experiences and share their accomplishments with others long after graduation.
After seeing the benefits of using ePortfolios across all of the university’s teacher prep programs, several nonlicensure programs are choosing to implement Taskstream by Watermark as a better way to manage key assessments, engage students, and promote intentional learning.
At the institutional level, ECU has had such success using Taskstream by Watermark that they are developing plans to broaden their use of the Watermark platform to support meaningful assessment practices in many other programs and colleges on campus.
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