Hi Alex,

There are two different versions: e-portfolios for students and e-portfolios for staff. The best starting point is the Australian ePortfolio project: http://www.eportfoliopractice.qut.edu.au/

This includes a report with explanations and uses of ePortfolios. Another useful site is: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/eportfolio/

This should give you a fair amount of material to begin with.

Cheers,

Henk

Interest in the use of ePortfolios in universities has increased over the past few years. ALTC and QUT have released their ePortfolio Report, and Stage 2 of the Project has just been announced which aims to progress Recommendations 8 and 9 in the final report, namely:

There is some good information available around ePortfolios, assessment and student independent learning from JISC

As part of RMIT's eLearning Advancement Program (REAP), we started a trial of PebblePad, a UK based ePortfolio tool, in September this year which will run till the end of 2009. This trial is for 1000 student licences to assess PebblePad as a viable enterprise level ePortfolio system, all of which have been allocated. We are focusing on ePortfolios for assessment, including evidencing Professional Practice / Accredition along with career planning and development as an adjunct for Work Integrated Learning. PebblePad also enables graduate attributes and employability skills frameworks to be constructed. So far we have received positive feedback from the students and staff and there is a lot of interest being generated around the university. We are also collaborating with UniSA as they are trialling PebblePad too.

Further information about the trial and its implementation at RMIT, including support resources, can be found at ePortfolios @ RMIT or contact meaghan.botterill@rmit.edu.au

E-portfolios are online platforms by which students can post personal/professional/academic profiles, as well as upload or display their work: research papers written, graphic work, etc. They serve as a kind of extended cv for students, and in the best instance can be platforms students can use not only within the institution during their enrolment, but also beyond their active enrolment into 'real' life. The concept of an e-portfolio has been shifting over time from something that acts primarily as a cv, to something that captures reflective learning, to something that acts more like a social network, with community-rich engagement. In this respect they morph into something that is also called a Personal Learning Environment (PLE).

While I have not personally used e-portfolios, I have looked into them quite a bit because it is part of the work I do at the moment. The proceedings of the upcoming Ascilite 2008 conference in Melbourne has a number of papers on e-portfolios with particular relevance to the Australian context and current practice: http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne08/procs/index.htm.

Pebblepad is one example of an e-portfolio platform: http://www.pebblepad.co.uk/default.asp; their take on the e-portfolio can be found here: http://www.pebblepad.co.uk/pp_website_resources/What_is_not_an_eportfolio.pdf.

The European Institute for E-learning has some good pages on e-portfolios:http://www.eportfolio.eu/.

Here is a good site from Washington State University on e-portfolio evolution and research: https://teamsite.oue.wsu.edu/progeval/eport/default.aspx.

Food for thought? Appetisers?

Thank you Henk and others for the information on e-Portfolios. Over the last few years I have heard the term used many times but have never taken time to explore the topic. The e-Portfloio Report has opened up a whole new world for me. I can see exciting new directions and many new possibilites for my work.
helen Farrell

e-Portfolios are a useful way of embedding career literacy into the curriculum as one possible response to employer dissatisfaction with Masters graduates in Accounting/Business/IT. International students particularly can show evidence of their work experience back home. I recently got Masters students in IT to do a skills matrix, one component of an ePortfolio and they come up with some great solutions using ppt/Microsoft Page templates/or Macromedia depending on their skill level. The starting point was to identify the graduate attributes for their courses and compare these with a skill set required by their profession, make up their own skill set and corroborate it with an industry interview. For each skill, they had to provide evidence (max 9 skills or attributes). They then gave an oral presentation on this process (formative assessment), feedback was given to improve their skills matrix and they handed in a more sophisticated matrix at the end of the 13 week course (summative assessment). Students included a photo of teaching IT in a military college in Saudi Arabia, a photo of entering a race in Denmark, a document of a course done in a business school in Copenhagen, work experience in a vet clinic in Japan etc This kind of evidence gives a much fuller picture of students' talents. These self-made portfolios also mean that students don't have to subscribe to professional ePortfolios like pebblepad which lock them into subscribing to the system after they graduate. The skills matrix is effectively an artifact within an e-portfolio and can be constantly updated as more work experience is gained. A useful reference I found is a huge book Book of Research on ePortfolios by A. Jafari and Kaufman (2006). Cost approx $100.

Judith Booth
La Trobe