Electronic Portfolios for Accreditation? A Follow-Up

In 2013, while doing the literature review for my dissertation, I found Trudy Banta's Assessment Update editorial, “Electronic Portfolios for Accreditation?” (Banta 2003). This editorial describes her team's disappointing experience with adapting IUPUI's institutional electronic portfolio to a web‐based self‐study for IUPUI's 2002 regional reaccreditation. To Banta's surprise, the visiting team did not greet this innovation, this “better mousetrap” (Banta 2003, p. 3), with the enthusiasm she had expected. Evidencing some frustration, Banta wrote: “I am calling this pioneering Web‐based institutional portfolio to your attention because we honestly have some important questions about it and would welcome your assistance in answering them” (Banta 2003, p. 3). My dissertation focused on exploring the prevalence of institution‐level electronic portfolio implementation for support of regional accreditation and/or reaffirmation, and the relationships between selected characteristics of these institutions and their regional accreditors. Ten years after Banta first asked her questions, I decided to incorporate her questions into my study to find the answers: (1) Is the electronic institutional portfolio really the way accreditation self‐studies will be presented in the future? (2) Must we continue to prepare a traditional narrative with links, so that in the end we can print it and send a paper copy to the review team? and (3) Might we be allowed to take full advantage of the capacity of the web to use a picture to convey a thousand words?