Electronic portfolios, most commonly known as ePortfolios, and also referred to as webfolios and digital folios, were covered extensively in a special issue devoted entirely to this topic back in May 2003. It’s still a hot topic that needs to be covered because the use of ePortfolios has great implications for enhancing teaching and learning.

Student, Teaching and Institutional ePortfolios

ePortfolios are basically "purposeful" collections of a wide variety of digital artifacts. They fall under three primary categories: student, teaching and institutional ePortfolios. There are numerous subcategories, as well as numerous issues and challenges, that fall within these three categories.

A student ePortfolio might be a collection of specific assignments that a student has completed to fulfill a certain requirement, such as a collection of academic work that has been assessed by faculty and meets National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) standards. Or it might be a career-oriented ePortfolio that has artifacts that could be important for prospective employers to see, such as a resume, references, awards and various recognition, and work samples related to specific competencies or skills. The real value of student ePortfolios, however, comes from students collecting, selecting and reflecting on their course-based assignments and learning experiences inside their ePortfolios over time, which is a great exercise for building critical-thinking skills. Peers and faculty can also provide feedback on these ePortfolio posts, resulting in a constructivist and/or scaffolding-related electronic teaching and learning environment that is well documented throughout a student’s academic career.

Teaching ePortfolios can be used for professional promotion and tenure purposes, or for sharing pedagogical strategies to be shared with other teachers to enhance learning. Institutional ePortfolios are currently being used for self-study and reaccreditation purposes at universities and colleges across the country.

A Message from AAHE on ePortfolios

The American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), which recently announced (unfortunately) that it will be closing its doors later this year, has been committed to understanding the importance of electronic portfolios. Barbara Cambridge, AAHE’s vice president of Fields of Inquiry and Action, had the following to say when asked her opinion about what higher education administrators should be aware of in relation to the adoption of ePortfolio technology and thinking on their campuses:

"They need to be aware of what their faculty thinks is important in learning. Faculty members want critical thinkers; faculty members want students that are aware of how they learn; they want students who can write; they want students who can communicate through multimedia, etc. Once you look at those features of what’s important in learning, and you ask yourself ‘how do we help students get there, and how do we know if students are making progress in those areas collectively, not as a separate little test for each one, but collectively,’ the best answer seems to be portfolios.

"And then they have to say, ‘okay, what do we get from doing electronic rather than print portfolios? And they need to look at how electronic portfolios teach information literacy, teach technology literacy, teach people how to operate in the different media that are important for people to operate in these days, and that they link students up with each other, and they have a link to operate across programs, and they have the potential of keeping the students linked to the university after they graduate. And that is a whole other segment of this; that institutions keep space available for their students to continue their electronic portfolios and continue to have an opportunity for everything from development issues to bringing them back for further education.

"Then I would make the claim that as the institutions are needing to show student learning outcomes for all their publics to which they are being accountable - whether it is a private school with a board of trustees or a public school with accreditors and legislators - that the data that is available in student portfolios, obviously done with privacy and all sorts of licensing in mind, becomes the only source that is comprehensive and authentic."

Where to Find More Information on ePortfolios

Two initiatives started by AAHE - an ePortfolio community of practice called EPAC and a National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research comprised of 21 institutions - are currently in a transition phase and are expected to remain in operation. We will report on their progress, in future issues, as they occur.

EDUCAUSE’s National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII), now called the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), has a website devoted to ePortfolios at www.educause.edu/ELI/5524 that is growing quickly in size and relevancy. Another good website for ePortfolio information is the ePortConsortium at www.eportconsortium.org. Their "Electronic Portfolios White Paper," written in 2003, has a lot of highly relevant information, including usage scenarios, potential benefits, vendor activity, system infrastructure issues, and more. Also, for the open-source version of ePortfolio technology, visit the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) website at www.theospi.org.

Samples

Numerous samples of electronic portfolios can be found online. The small number listed here are provided as examples of the various types of ePortfolios being created today.

Student ePortfolios:
St Olaf College - (www.stolaf.edu/depts/cis/webcommunity.htm) - Uses a "common tools approach" in its Individual Majors Program, whereby students create reflective-oriented ePortfolios using HTML editors such as Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Florida State University (FSU)  - FSU’s Career Center, a division of Student Affairs, created a career ePortfolio system (www.career.fsu.edu/portfolio) that the entire campus currently uses. More than 22,000 students have singed on to the system since it launched in April 2002.

Teaching ePortfolios:
Knowledge Media Lab (KML) of the Carnegie Foundation - The samples at http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org were created with KML’s Keep ToolKit (www.carnegiefoundation.org/kml/KEEP/index.htm), which is a set of free web-based tools that help teachers, students and institutions quickly create compact and engaging knowledge representations on the web.

Institutional ePortfolios:
The two institutional ePortfolios most often referred to are at Portland State University (www.portfolio.pdx.edu) and Indianapolis University and Purdue University Indianapolis (www.imir.iupui.edu/iupuifolio).  Both came out of the Urban Universities Portfolio Project (www.imir.iupui.edu/portfolio/) which took place from 1998-2001.