E-portfolios :: Making Things E-asy (2)

E-portfolios :: Making Things E-asy
by John K. Waters
Weigand actually studied under one of the creators of the e-portfolio solution she implemented at Hope Arts. She first saw Digication’s Spotlight e-portfolio application while a student at RISD. She took a class taught by Kelly Driscoll on introducing the technology into the classroom. Driscoll and her husband, Jeffrey Yan, another RISD faculty member, had developed the program.
"[E-portfolios] can provide multiple examples of each student‘s work...and they can be viewed anywhere in the world, literally. What you end up with is something like an online gallery."
— Amy Weigand, Hope High School
Yan and Driscoll, educators by profession, are a somewhat reluctant pair of entrepreneurs. They both currently teach graduate- level classes at RISD, which is also where they earned their own graduate degrees. Back in 2001, dissatisfied with available applications, the couple began developing their own platform for publishing their students’ work on the web. “We built something really, really simple,” Yan recalls. “No frills; just something that would let us get our work done.”
Word of the couple’s pet project got around RISD’s Department of Art and Design Education, and eventually got the attention of the department head, Paul Sproll. In 2002, with Sproll’s encouragement, Yan and Driscoll took their show on the road and founded Digication, which now sells two components that the couple developed: the Campus course management software and the Spotlight e-portfolio solution. Today, more than 450 schools in the United States use the programs; about a third of them are K-12 institutions.
Modeled after a webmail client, such as Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, the application was designed to be dead easy to use, Yan says. He points to his company’s lack of training materials as evidence of the simplicity of the software. “I like to think that if someone can go online to the Yahoo website and create a Yahoo e-mail account, they can go to [our] site and set up an e-portfolio,” he says.
Interestingly, Spotlight is available free to the first 1,000 users in any accredited US school. Teachers, students, and alumni can sign up for an account on the company’s website and, with a few clicks of a mouse, create an e-portfolio, online course, or online community. Users also have access to all of the company’s online classroom tools.
“We certainly want this to be a sustainable business,” Yan says, explaining that the company makes money through the sale of services and support applications. “But we’re really educators first. Our ultimate goal is to help people to teach and learn better.”
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