Particpants, Components, Process

Participants

The main participants of the eportfolio development process are: learners, instructors, and institutions. The end-users of eportfolios are: prospective employers, instructors (for assessment), parents, and award granting agencies.

• Learner
• Instructor
• Prospective employers
• Parent
• Award granting agency

Eportfolios offer many benefits for learners as they seek to create and reflect on life experiences.

• Personal knowledge management
• History of development and growth
• Planning/goal setting tool
• Assist learners in making connections between learning experiences (his may include formal and informal learning).
• Provide the metacognitive elements needed to assist learners in planning future learning needs based on previous successes and failures.
• Personal control of learning history (as compared to organizations controlling learner history).

Faculty members also benefit from the use of eportfolios:

• Means to share content with others faculty
• Move to more authentic assessment (as opposed to testing)
• Preparing learners for life-long learning
• Create an assessment-trail that is centralized and under leaner control

Institutions also experience direct value in initiating eportfolio use in learning:

• Providing value for learners by allowing personal control
• Contribute to the development of a more permanent role in the lives of learners (i.e. education is not viewed as a 2-4 year relationship, but rather a life-long relationship)

An ideal eportfolio system should allow flexible input (each item can carry its own metadata and be treated as a unique object), organization (objects/artifacts can be hierarchically organized in folders), retrieval (objects can be searched based on eportfolio owner’s specifications), and display (items can be grouped and permission granted to intended audience). If these criteria are followed, an eportfolio can be used as a very versatile tool to meet the needs of all potential participants in the process. For example, an eportfolio owner places objects into the system, assigning basic metadata at the time of entry (the metadata is helpful, but not critical. The search system itself can provide the intelligence to locate items). When the learner wishes to provide a course instructor with evidence of having attained a particular learning objective, she/he can draw items from the portfolio and send a link to the instructor. Similarly, when applying for employment, the learner can draw resources from the database which support the required skills. The context for each object is provided based at the time of use.

Components

Eportfolios can include a wide range of information:

• Personal information
• Education history
• Recognition – awards and certificates
• Reflective comments
• Coursework – assignment, projects
• Instructor comments
• Previous employer comments
• Goals, plans
• Personal values and interests
• Presentations, papers
• Personal activities – volunteer work, professional development
  All of the artifacts included should have a purpose – they should demonstrate a skill, an attribute, and learning acquired from experience.

Process of Eportfolio Creation

Varying processes exist to detail the portfolio creation process. One of the simpler models (ePortfolio Portal, 2004) is based on four broad activities:

1. Collecting items for the portfolio
2. Selecting items best able to demonstrate competence
3. Reflecting on the items selecting in order to demonstrate learning derived from experiences
4. Connecting various aspects of life – personal, learning, work, and community

The PLAR process utilized at Red River College suggests these steps for the creation and evaluation of an educational portfolio: