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Purpose
The “Urban Universities Portfolio Project:  Assuring Quality for Multiple Publics” brings together six leading urban public universities to develop a new medium:  electronic institutional portfolios that demonstrate the universities’ effectiveness to various groups of stakeholders.  Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and cosponsored by the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), the project has three main emphases:  to enhance internal and external stakeholders’ understanding of the mission of urban public universities; to develop a new approach to cultivating ongoing internal improvement; and to experiment with new ways of demonstrating and evaluating effectiveness and accountability in the context of mission.

Urban Public Universities and Institutional Portfolios
Urban public universities represent a growing, increasingly important sector of U.S. higher education.  Many of these universities are pioneering  innovations in teaching non-traditional students, widening access, and engaging with their communities.  But such work is not reflected in prevailing rating and ranking approaches, which tend to focus on resources and inputs and to assume a traditional paradigm for higher education institutions and students. The missions and accomplishments of urban universities and the particular challenges they face may thus be poorly understood by such external stakeholders as accreditors, state governments, students and parents, and the communities the universities serve.  One purpose of the UUPP is to build greater public awareness of the contributions of urban public universities and to establish benchmarks that will allow them to be compared with appropriate peers.

The institutional portfolios under development serve as vehicles for capturing the distinctive characteristics, work and accomplishments of urban public universities.  The portfolios combine authentic materials, such as student work samples, with assessment data and reflective critique to show the outcomes the universities aim to produce, the processes and practices used to work toward those outcomes, and the actual results achieved.  Student learning experiences and outcomes, and the ways in which these are shaped by the urban context and mission, are one major focus; community engagement is another.  With these focuses in mind, project universities are developing a shared description of “urban public university,” measures of effectiveness that reflect the universities’ urban missions and characteristics, and models for documenting several fundamental learning outcomes.

Other types of higher education institutions may also have much to gain from this kind of work.  An important product of the UUPP will thus be a set of principles and guidelines for constructing electronic institutional portfolios that will be applicable across the spectrum of higher education.  (To view initial versions of several institutional portfolios, please consult the UUPP web site at the URL provided below.)

New Approaches to Improvement and Accountability
Another aspect of the project may also be of interest to other institutions and to accrediting organizations:  the developing portfolios form the basis for  new approaches to both internal improvement and external evaluation of institutional effectiveness.  Over the course of the last year-and-a-half, UUPP universities have found that creating an institutional portfolio brings about substantial internal benefits.  The complexity of the project demands broad campus involvement, creating an occasion for large segments of the university to think together about how particular practices, programs and initiatives connect with one another and contribute to overall institutional mission.  This collaboration is helping to build institutional identity and community, developing and reinforcing shared visions and commitments that lead to meaningful institutional change and improvement.  Already, several UUPP universities have launched significant assessment and improvement initiatives resulting directly from their portfolio work.

In addition, the project envisions portfolio development, not as a one-time task, but as an ongoing system that allows a university to monitor its performance and document that performance for internal and external stakeholders.  The electronic portfolio web sites will thus evolve continuously, demonstrating changes and improvements unfolding over real time.  In this way, the portfolios incorporate a commitment to continuous, rather than episodic, self-assessment and improvement, and demonstrate the universities’ skills in assessment and self-correction.

As the portfolios develop, the UUPP is experimenting with ways in which site visits and electronic institutional portfolios might complement one another, leading to new approaches that external evaluators, especially accreditors, might use to learn about and evaluate institutions.  Experimental visits in Spring 2000 and Spring 2001 will use the portfolios and other evidence provided by the universities to examine learning outcomes as well as institutions’ processes for assuring educational quality and effectiveness.  Visitors will consider such questions as:  How has the institution developed systems for assessing its own performance?  What are the standards of evidence?  What are the results?

At the same time, visit teams will be seeking ways to make the visit process itself more valuable for everyone involved.  The Spring 2000 visits will combine virtual “visits” to the portfolio sites with physical visits to the universities.  The project will study how virtual visits can be done most effectively, and how actual visits change when they follow virtual ones.  The project will also examine the role of visitors: for example, can visitors combine consultative and evaluative roles in effective ways?  How can visitors help the institution become a learning organization?  How can accreditation and other forms of review be as productive as possible?       Lessons from the Spring 2000 visits will be used to modify the plans and procedures for a second round of visits in Spring 2001.

Participants
The lead university for the UUPP is Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).  Other participating universities include California State University, Sacramento; Georgia State University; Portland State University; the University of Illinois at Chicago; and the University of Massachusetts Boston.  A National Advisory Board of distinguished members representing government, business, foundations, and higher education advises the project about its aims, practices and progress.  An Institutional Review Board, comprised of higher education leaders and members of accrediting organizations, works with the participating institutions on portfolio development, participates in site visits, and contributes ideas and expertise to the project as a whole.

A project leadership team provides overall direction for the initiative.  Members include Yolanda Moses, President of AAHE; Barbara Cambridge, Director of AAHE's Teaching Initiatives and Associate Dean of Faculties at IUPUI; William M. Plater, Executive Vice Chancellor and Dean of Faculties at IUPUI; Susan Kahn, UUPP Director and Director of Programs and Planning, Office for Professional Development at IUPUI; and Victor Borden, Director of Information Management and Institutional Research at IUPUI.

In addition, each participating campus has its own project director, who  manages the campus-specific work of the project, and an institutional research representative, who  oversees development of the institutional research component of the portfolio.

Cosponsors
American Association for Higher Education (AAHE)
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

Funding Agency
The Pew Charitable Trusts

Project Web Site
http://www.imir.iupui.edu/portfolio

UUPP Participating Universities
California State University-Sacramento
Georgia State University
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
Portland State University
University of Illinois at Chicago
University of Massachusetts at Boston