E-Portfolios | News

Pathbrite Offers Digital Portfolio, Gets Embedded into Pearson LMS

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 01/15/13

Education startup Pathbrite has released Pathbrite Portfolios for Educators, a tool for instructors to help their students maintain digital evidence of their learning journeys. The company also announced that Pearson Learning Solutions would be integrating the digital portfolio program into LearningStudio, Pearson's cloud-based learning management system for online courses.

Pathbrite, formerly named rrripple, provides an online service to let students collect, organize, and reflect on assignments, research, projects, internships, volunteer work, and job experience. The service is free to school staff and faculty, and pricing for students is $10 a year. It's intended for both high school and college students.

The application allows users to access their portfolios from any kind of computing device, including smart phones, and provides unlimited storage of artifacts and media in the cloud. Among the types of content a user may maintain in the portfolio are videos, presentations, Web sites, papers, photos, transcripts, grades, diplomas, jobs, trips, assessments, and awards. Others besides the instructor may be given permission by the student to view and comment on portfolio contents.

To set up portfolios for students, instructors:

• Create the course in the Pathbrite program;
• Specify how it will be paid for--either by allowing the student to pay the annual fee or use a school-purchased license;
• Enter class information, such as course name and subject; and
• Invite the teaching staff and students to join either directly or as a bulk file input.

The instructor creates a "portfolio of portfolios" to organize student work for review.

To set up a portfolio, the student creates a profile to store the portfolio, imports artifacts from online sources, groups them into categories, tags them, adds titles and descriptions, and specifies privacy settings to allow others access.