According to a March 24, 2003 IUPUI press release, Bowling Green State University, Maricopa Community Colleges, Penn State University, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and University of Wisconsin Eau Claire are all a part of this new consortium "to further define, design and develop the framework and compatibility of the Epsilen Portfolios software system. ‘We intend to collaborate with educational and corporate institutions to define and adopt Epsilen Portfolios’ interoperability and transportability standards,’ Jafari said. ‘Together, we hope to develop an electronic portfolio system that is compatible and can be easily integrated with commercial course management software and campus portals.’"

While these campuses collaborate on the further development of ePortfolio standards, the software is slated to be released very soon (if not already by press time) "to any institution that is interested to try it as a beta tester," says Jafari. "Institutions will be able to access the software for one year and try it out with the notion that they would give us feedback and work from the conceptual and technical perspectives. This is basically an early adopters program."

Jafari says "maybe a couple hundred institutions," (if that many are interested) will participate in this early adopter’s program, with the system software hosted on IUPUI servers. Additionally, other beta-testing institutions that may wish to integrate the ePortfolio system with their own course management system will be offered to participate in a slightly different early adopter’s program that will include paying a small fee, to be determined, to cover set-up expenses.

Meanwhile, IUPUI’s Epsilen ePortfoilios system is currently in a late development phase for becoming a "fully enterprised program that will hook up with our course management system, our registrar’s office, student advising and library systems," says Sharon Hamilton, IUPUI’s Chancellor’s Professor of English, who is working on the academic side of the IUPUI implementation. "It will be piloted starting in the Fall [2003], and we are hoping that this will become the organizing, coherent electronic student portfolio system for the [IUPUI] campus."

From a teaching and learning standpoint, what will this mean for the IUPUI campus community? According to Hamilton, "we are hoping it is going to be transformational for students. We also believe it will impact faculty lives in a way that it will make a lot of the work they do more public."

Hamilton also believes online learning programs will utilize ePortfolio technology in a way that will show an enhanced and more accurate record of a student’s true online learning experience. For example, with an ePortfolio system integrated with a course management system, a student’s online-learning achievements can be more easily documented and shared, and these achievements can include authenticated representations of student/faculty interactions that ultimately reveal progressively improved learning outcomes.