Designing an ePortfolio-based assessment strategy to support longitudinal development of clinical competence in a large medical program

A substantial amount of medical student training occurs in the haphazard and unpredictable clinical environment where student learning competes with other important priorities such as patient care. How to capture these opportunistic learning experiences and scaffold connections to the desired educational goals, and still meet the needs of individual learning pathways, is challenging. The introduction of an ePortfolio provided an opportunity to map assessments being conducted in the clinical workplace to clinical and professional competencies in order to make explicit the relevance of each of these disparate learning experiences.