Some of the other questions presented to the 11 education organization leaders interviewed for this issue of Educational Pathways  included the following (with selected answers):

Bourne: There is a considerable interest in ePortfolios. ePortfolios represent a very interesting method for assisting teaching and learning. There remain barriers, however, to understanding how to best use ePortfolios. For example, we have seen only spare work on natural language understanding in ePortfolios, which is a key to scaling up.

Twigg: I spent 16 years at Empire State College, and they use portfolios and use narrative evaluations of student work. The problem is that it takes an incredible amount of work to do this, and there is basically no audience for it. When Empire State students went on to [apply for] graduate school, the admission officers groaned when they were faced with their portfolios because they preferred some easier measure, if you will. They wanted a Graduate Record Exam score; they wanted a GPA. I’m not saying that is the right attitude, but it is the real attitude. Plus, the idea that an employer is going to read through all this stuff. I just don’t think that is realistic.

Dalziel: ITC has not looked at this trend in any depth. My feeling is that the use of the term "ePortfolio" sounds like something new or revolutionary is taking place, but professors have often required students to create print-based, graphic or audio portfolios to assess whether learning has taken place. Although high-end computers and the Internet allow students to make more visually appealing portfolios, incorporating more types of graphics, audio and other materials than ever before, I am not sure the concept is new or different than what has always taken place in the classroom.

Chaloux: I believe you will see a relatively quick and widespread adoption of ePortfolios because they will help address credit transfer and articulation issues. From our discussions with institutions and institutional registrars and admission officers, they are ready to go with this. One additional point: ePortfolios will be linked, in my view, with secondary data systems to provide more seamless data transfer/use in the K-12 arena.

Bourne: I find that people talk about this topic in the membership that I deal with. The concept of reusable objects is a fine one. Object-oriented paradigms, in general, are the right thing to understand due to the prospective time and effort savings. However, in my view, progress has not been nearly as great for learning objects as we would like. In the training world, more progress has been made than with higher education learning objects.

Boetttcher: This will happen, but it will not be easy. It will not likely be the avenue for solving the problem of the high costs of higher education, but it will help. We will see standardization and high utilization of objects for core concepts in major disciplines. The first disciplines that will effectively use these objects will be in the sciences and math.

Twigg: The idea of having reusable learning objects is a very good idea but right now it won’t work for a variety of reasons - one of which relates to the point that, while there is a movement toward interoperability standards, they do not exist now. So long as interoperability standards do not exist, it makes the idea trivial. . . The second problem is that repositories lack an essential ingredient, and that is transfer methodology. They assume that a garden-variety faculty member is going to look at something in a repository and magically use it - and that just does not happen. . . Having a bunch of reusable learning objects does not do any harm, but to devote a lot of time and energy to it without a transfer methodology is pretty much a waste of time.

Johnstone: I think one of the interesting things in the learning object arena is that the publishers are trying to figure out what they can do to make their online presence more viable within the framework. But I think another thing, that is not just wishful thinking, is the idea of larger chunks than just simple, little learning objects. I mean larger chunks of material that faculty can use in ways that are meaningful, because trying to integrate just a single learning object into what you are doing is horrifically time consuming. While that is all nice and good, and there are faculty who are doing that and using what is out there, by and large the majority of them are not in a position where they can use all their time to search around for the appropriate learning objects.

Twigg: Absolutely. Just as has happened in library automation and administrative applications - the same process, almost exactly, is occurring in teaching and learning. In the beginning, everybody used to write their own administrative systems and no one does that anymore; people used to write their own library systems, and no one does that anymore. It is just the teaching and learning field is less mature than those other arenas. As the IMS standards become real and integrated, and materials start to become interoperable, then you will have much more flexibility, which is what people want from vendors.

Boettcher: Certain professional areas, in particular professional programs in business, engineering, medicine, law and pharmacy. . . Some of those are making money. If they are not, I think they can be in the future. I think for many working professionals, time is their most scarce resource. Many need to remain certified in their fields, and I think those who provide certification services online can make some money. If people are not making some money on that, they ought to be. But it is hard. It is easier for people to set aside time and leave their offices for a day or two days or three days, than to find a way to carve out online time in one or two hour chunks or segments. However, I still think as people become more accustomed to online learning, and also, if you think generationally - as the generation that is now 20 years old gets to be 40 years old, they are going to be much more comfortable going online. So I think those things will come together in the future.

Milliron: We have cohorts of students who are clearly digital-aged. We have returning students, some of whom are digital-aged and many who are not. We still have a number of students out of high schools who come from communities that are not wired; and we have students from suburban areas who have always lived a wired live. One of the things about our infrastructures that’s very important is that, as we mainstream online learning and online students services, we do it very thoughtfully, allowing for those different touch points, allowing for face-to-face contact and phone contact and the online experience blending together.

Chaloux: The persistent challenges continue to be those where academic tradition, practice and policy collides with online student needs. There are numerous examples. Here are three:

The third challenge focuses on our primary mission of the content of learning. Current curricula need updating, and new curricula are needed.