Recently Ittelson also hosted a two-day meeting at California State University, Monterey Bay, where he is Director of the Interactive Design and Educational Applications (IDEA) Lab. Nineteen people representing 13 institutions attended this meeting to discuss ePortfolios.

Ittelson believes that much of the transformational work in ePortfolios will occur in the area of assessing and measuring student learning. He explains that accrediting agencies, in general, measure educational effectiveness at institutions by inquiring about such conditions as how many faculty are on board, what kind of governance construct exists, how big is the library, and how an institution basically spends its resources. "The assumption was that if all this is working, we know student learning will take place," he says. "Well, there is a movement saying ‘no, we want to really see that good learning is actually taking place.’"

So the question becomes can an ePortfolio be a valid measure of a student’s true learning experience? According to Ittelson, the emergence of ePortfolios at institutions today has the capacity to "empower students to be able to document their learning with artifacts that can be briefly commented on by faculty and ultimately stored and certified in ways similar to an official college transcript."

Nonetheless, Ittelson adds that although a great deal of work is being conducted in this vein by many educators in the world of ePortfolios, "there aren’t any bombshells that have come out. As it grows, it is probably less likely that there is going to be a Microsoft Office of ePortfolios. The tools are going to be different. Applications are going to be different, and ePortfolios will have more adjectives describing their usage.