Student-governed electronic portfolios as a tool to involve university teachers in competency-oriented curriculum development

At the University of Twente (Netherlands), a new curriculum on educational science and technology has been introduced. That occasion was used to try to develop an apprenticeship model in which the students are regarded as young professionals from the very beginning. In that model, the students are expected to govern their professional growth by actively collecting evidence of acquired competencies in electronic portfolios. This activity should stimulate teachers to adapt their teaching style to the requests from students for feedback on products that the students would like to put into their portfolios. After three iterations of development in three consecutive academic years, however, the use of portfolios is still not successful. The reasons why are discussed in this paper, and future steps to be taken are suggested