The latest news from the AAEEBL community:
It is with sorrow and admiration that we at AAEEBL pay tribute to Barbara Larson Cambridge: Mother, Friend, Scholar, Mentor
October 26, 1943 – August 24, 2026
In Memory of Barbara,
A champion of ePortfolios and an inspirational leader within the ePortfolio community, Barbara Larson Cambridge died on August 24, 2026; she was 82 years old. She did so much and meant so much to so many of us that it’s not easy to describe her contributions; what is easy to say is that these contributions were many and valuable.
I first met Barbara at the 1995 Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) conference in Bellingham, Washington: she was the Past President of the group and already a faculty leader at Indiana University, where she had served in multiple roles over the years, including as Director of Writing, Associate Chair of the English Department, and Associate Dean of the Faculty. Two years later, she took on two new inter-institutional nationally based signature roles. First, she served as the Director of the CASTL Campus Program, an effort sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to support research inquiry into teaching and learning across disciplines and at multiple levels: the individual scholar, the college and university, and the disciplinary association. Second, Barbara joined the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), serving there as its Assessment Director before becoming Vice President for Fields of Inquiry and Action and Vice President for Programs.
In important ways, these experiences set the stage for Barbara’s work in and leadership of ePortfolios. Like many of us, she began with print portfolios, seeing as a professor of writing studies how helpful they would be for students learning to write across contexts; soon, she was encouraging faculty in many disciplines to develop portfolios for courses–and for programs. Especially valuable would be portfolios for program assessment, Barbara thought, since they provide both a means of analysis of student growth and achievement and a means of improving curriculum. As important, and more quickly than many, Barbara also understood that given changes in digital technology, print portfolios would become electronic, and in early 1999, she invited Susan Kahn, Dan Tompkins, and me to work with her on the first book on ePortfolios, Electronic Portfolios: Emerging Practices in Student, Faculty, and Institutional Learning (2001). Divided into three sections, Electronic Portfolios addressed all three dimensions of ePortfolio institutional activity: Student Learning; Faculty Development; and Institutional Accountability.
Then, in 2003, at a meeting on the west coast, Barbara and I discussed our shared perception that while ePortfolio activity was increasing across the US, the documentation of its effects was not. We decided to change that situation by creating the National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, whose purpose was to support cohorts of faculty and staff from all institutional types in documenting the ePortfoliobased learning on their campuses. (A list of all participating campuses—with all institutional types included, among them public, private, four-year, two-year, HBCU and other MSIs–is below, and research reports from the institutions are still available online: https://incepr.org/emergent_findings.html#finalreports)
Soon, a UK-specific cohort joined the Coalition, and our leadership, having expanded once with the addition of Darren Cambridge, expanded again with the addition of Rob Ward and Janet Striven from the Center for Recording Achievement and Steve Outram from the Higher Education Academy, UK. In short, our National Coalition became the Inter/National Coalition. And through the later addition of colleagues from Australia and the Coalition support of EU ePortfolio efforts, the Inter/National Coalition expanded even further.
As Barbara knew from her work with SOTL—in addition to her work for CASTL, she also served during this time as President of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning— dissemination of research findings is critical. Toward that end, in 2009 she co-edited her second volume on ePortfolios, this a volume emerging from the research projects of 20 Coalition participant institutions, Electronic Portfolios 2.0: Emergent Research on Implementation and Impact. Including research examining effects in multiple areas—among them, student reflection, integrative learning, ePortfoliodeveloping identity, organizational learning, and designs for learning supported by technology—it also was the first volume to demonstrate that ePortfolios do contribute to students’ academic progress.
During the last years of the Coalition, it became apparent that the word ePortfolio was being used in such a sufficiently large and diverse number of ways that, at times, it wasn’t clear what was being referenced; there was also a concern that ePortfolios were not supporting students as well as they might. To address these issues, Barbara helped us identify what she called the non-negotiable elements of ePortfolios, expressed as four propositions—for instance, “For a meaningful assessment, interaction of pieces of evidence within an ePortfolio is more important than single pieces of evidence” and “ePortfolios enable meaningful comparison of student learning across institutions (and other contexts) without standardization.” These propositions, which point to the transformational promise of ePortfolio cohorts, then grounded the work of the last Coalition cohorts.
This, then, is something of Barbara’s ePortfolio legacy, although I can’t close without noting how she shared that legacy. She was always smart, pragmatic, positive, generous, and collaborative. Insightful, she shared her ideas generously; she always recognized the value of others’ ideas; and she was always willing to make common cause. She understood and was committed to a higher education focused on providing opportunity for every student and on designing and researching ePortfolios that would help make that opportunity material and real.
Those of us who worked with her will continue to miss her: she was a vibrant colleague, a wonderful colleague, and a model leader. We know how much we are in her debt, as are those who will continue to benefit from all she gave us.
–Kathleen Blake Yancey
Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research
Cohort I
Alverno College
Bowling Green State University
Indiana University-Purdue University
Indianapolis (IUPUI)
LaGuardia Community College
Northern Illinois University
Portland State University
Stanford University
Cohort II
Clemson University
Kapi’olani Community College
George Mason University
Thomas College
The Ohio State University
University of Georgia
University of Illinois
University of Nebraska Omaha
Washington State University
University of Washington
Virginia Tech University
Cohort III
Arizona State University
California State Universities
Florida State University
Framingham State University
George Mason University
Minnesota State Colleges and Universities
Penn State University
University of San Diego
Seton Hall University
Sheffield Hallam University
University of Waterloo
University of Wolverhampton
Cohort IV
University of Bradford
University of Cumbria
University of Groningen
London Metropolitan University
University of Manchester Medical School
University of Michigan
University of Northumbria
University of Nottingham
Queen Margaret University College
University of Wolverhampton
Cohort V
Kapi’olani Community College
University of Akron
University of Cincinnati
University of Denver
University of Oregon
Virginia State University
Virginia Tech
Cohort VI
Bowling Green State University
Curtin University of Technology (Australia)
Goshen College
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Lamar University
Northeastern University
Portland State University
University of Georgia
University of Michigan
University of Mississippi
Virginia Military Institute
Westminster College
Cohort VII
Clemson University
Deakin University (Australia)
DePaul University
Lamar University
Loyola University
Santa Clara University
University of Cincinnati
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________