IN THIS ARTICLE    »  Introduction    »  Factors Driving Increased ePortfolio Usage Today    »  Current Trends in ePortfolios    »  ePortfolios and Open Standards    »  Benefits of ePortfolios    »  Conclusion

ePortfolios are organized collections of digital information that represent what an individual has learned over time, how they have reflected on that learning, and how they chose to present that learning to others. Although today's ePortfolios share many of the core themes of portfolios that extend back to ancient Greece, the power of technology has dramatically expanded the potential application of ePortfolios far beyond what students have been using for centuries.

Adoption of ePortfolios has been driven by fundamental shifts in technology, learning, and the needs of both learners and teachers. An increasing amount of an individual's work is now being done electronically and more emphasis is being placed globally on lifelong learning and informal, just-in-time learning. Governments, educators, students, and parents all are searching for better ways to determine the effectiveness of learning over time, without relying totally on high-stakes testing.

Although they go by different labels, there are essentially three main types of ePortfolios: developmental, reflective and representational. Developmental ePortfolios document everything that the owner has done during a period of time, such as in achieving an undergraduate degree. Reflective ePortfolios add personal reflection to this content on the impact the learning has had on the owner's development. Representational ePortfolios show the owner's achievements in relation to a particular task, like getting a job, or developmental goals. Owners control the selection of and access to the content depending on the intended viewing audience. The three main types may be mixed to achieve different learning, personal, or work-related outcomes.

Factors Driving Increased ePortfolio Usage Today
ePortfolios are already being used in many different ways as individuals and institutions discover the wide applicability of the technology. The challenge in many institutions is not to build an ePortfolio culture, but to integrate it into existing activities and practices. Here is a sampling of current global drivers.

• Accreditation: Many institutions are looking to drive a theme of continuous improvement and to promote a culture within faculty and students to foster continuous lifelong learning and reflection. ePortfolios are being used to answer the question from the accreditation team, "Do you have reports from a system that will show how you are addressing student progress toward learning objectives and goals?"
  
  According to Malcolm Hobbs, vice president of marketing and business development at Sun Microsystems partner Nuventive [link to www.nuventive.com], "From an institutional perspective, ePortfolios support quality assurance, institutional accountability, and particularly in the United States, accreditation efforts. Accreditation agencies won't approve a process where a lot of documents are created and handed off to the agency at the last minute for the purpose of passing the accreditation. They are increasingly requiring that an overall strategy and processes are in place, and that there is demonstrated support for and evidence of ongoing performance improvement."
  
  
• Digital, Not Physical: Student work today, be it research papers, presentations, experiments, or group collaborations, is largely being captured in digital, rather than paper form, lending itself well to electronic presentation and organizational tools like ePortfolios. More importantly, an increasing amount of this content is being created in open, rather than proprietary standards. This increases ePortfolio's interoperability and virtual life, while increasing the opportunities for collaboration.
  
  
• Professional Organizations: Thousands of professional organizations, from licensing agencies to senior citizen groups, provide on-going learning and/or certification for members. Increasingly, ePortfolios are seen as a value-added tool to assist members in documenting their professional skills and accomplishments.
  
  
• Lifelong Learning: The increased focus on continuous learning has brought attention to learning that occurs outside the formal education system. ePortfolios have a role here as well, allowing individuals to document the type of work and experiences that they are exposed to outside a classroom setting, bridging the gap between informal and formal learning.
  
  
• The Participation Age: The idea of sharing information about oneself selectively with others, while controlling access to and presentation of this information, is a key factor contributing to the importance of ePortfolios and one of the reasons why it is the ideal tool for developing personal and institutional linkages.

Current Trends in ePortfolios
Current trends in ePortfolios mirror what Sun has been saying about the education market for years — successful diffusion of technology is driven by open standards and the availability of tools, resources, and communities that foster sharing of best practices to accelerate adoption.

While accreditation is a driving factor impacting the need for ePortfolios, it is only one of the key trends emerging in this fast-growing field. There are a number of other trends as well.

• Individual Ownership of the Data: In a formal education setting, students, as well as school employees, should have total control over who has access to the portfolio and which of perhaps dozens of presentational perspectives the viewer sees. Students grant rights to the institution to access portions of their private data securely, so that consolidated views at the institutional level can be achieved.
  
  
• Individual Focus vs. Group Focus: While the popular notion of ePortfolios focuses on their use as tools for individuals, they also play an increasing role in presenting and assessing individual courses. Many instructors are already using ePortfolios as the "assignment" on which a student's grade is based. ePortfolios are also being used to assess the instructional effectiveness of programs and departments.
  
  
• The "Whole" Student: There's a very strong notion for universities to present the "whole" individual, not just the "student." While an individual's academic accomplishments are a core measure of how effectively the institution is fulfilling its educational mission, a significant amount of learning and individual development occurs outside of the classroom. Thus a university student's ePortfolio might include his or her athletic accomplishments or community service in addition to the more traditional academic achievements. Historically, physical transcripts or resumes have under-represented the value of the non-academic aspects of a student's development.
  
  
• Repository vs. a Series of Collections: ePortfolios are much more than electronic file cabinets in which to place digital files, providing organization and perspective to the data. "It's an important distinction," notes Hobbs of Nuventive. "An individual can have an unlimited number of portfolios, each representing a different viewpoint of their life, such as academics, community service, or athletics, or any combination of these things. It all gets back to the concept of the individual having lifetime control."
  
  Steve Dyer, chief information officer of California's Woodbury University, a Nuventive user, offers another perspective. At Woodbury, sample templates assist students and faculty in organizing and presenting their information. "If you just give them the software," explained Dyer, "you'll end up with a worthless hodgepodge of data. You have to provide focus and tight control so that it doesn't become a big electronic filing cabinet."
  
  
• Integration with Other Institutional Applications and Services: Through open standards-based integration, ePortfolios can add real value to other applications, such as student information systems or learning management systems (LMS), which tend to be institution-centric. None of these systems provide a vehicle for a learner-centric view. While the ePortfolio provides many points of integration with an LMS for passing individual data back and forth, the true value of the ePortfolio may be in the student's reflections on previous work, or feedback from faculty or peers. It's not just that you passed the course, but what did you learn and what evidence do you have to back it up.

ePortfolios and Open Standards
Sun is involved with several groups developing open source and open standards for ePortfolios, among them the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) and the IMS Global Learning Consortium.

OSPI is an evolving group of institutions and individuals collaborating on the development of a non-proprietary open source electronic portfolio software solution. The first release in 2003 was based on work done by the University of Minnesota. However, the 2.0 release of 2005 was designed by an international, multidisciplinary team to encompass a number of best practices to provide a rich, flexible and open environment to accommodate a variety of potential uses. Portability of the tool was deemed critical and the ePortfolio infrastructure is being developed using a Sakai-based process using Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) OsiDs and IMS standards to enable seamless integration with other applications and services.

The IMS Global Learning Consortium's ePortfolio standard is largely an amalgamation of existing IMS specifications packaged not only to ensure interoperability, but to account for all the ways individuals and organizations might utilize ePortfolios in their personal, professional, and academic lives. The standard centers around two broad types of information an individual might want to collect in an ePortfolio — that created by the individual and formal records of achievement about the individual created by others.

Benefits of ePortfolios
ePortfolios offer significant benefits to all parties in the learning equation. For learners, they create a platform for taking control of their personal knowledge management. ePortfolios not only demonstrate a history of personal development, growth, and reflection, but can act as a planning and goal-setting tool as well. They can empower students to discern and validate pathways to success and enrich learning experiences by making meaningful connections between formal learning, work experience and co-curricular experiences.

In addition to being able to partner in a student's progress, faculty can benefit from another tool to assess the effectiveness of their teaching and their own professional development. ePortfolios also allow faculty to share research and other content with each other in a controlled manner. Institutions benefit from the aforementioned role in accreditation and ongoing institutional effectiveness assessment. Evidence also suggests that ePortfolios can contribute to a more permanent role in the ongoing development of alumni.

Conclusion
With ePortfolios, individuals now have the tools and resources to present self-advocating information and materials in a well-organized, structured way. They are powerful tools for any individual, providing structure and a venue for reflection on the accomplishments of a lifetime of formal and informal learning.

ePortfolios give individuals the opportunity to meet the needs relevant to their profession. The development of an ePortfolio encourages faculty-student mentoring, peer-supported active learning, and continuous reflection of professional growth. The process of creating, improving, and maintaining an ePortfolio encourages continuous self-reflection and acquisition of new skills and technological proficiency.

While ePortfolios are here today and in great use, continued emphasis must be placed on the development of open standards which promote the portability, interoperability and collaboration-enabling aspects of ePortfolios. This will allow them to interoperate seamlessly with other campus enterprise applications such as student information systems and learning management systems. When fully matured and implemented by capable educators throughout every discipline in an educational institution, they promise a viable alternative to high-stakes testing, focusing education back on teaching and learning rather than on test-taking.