Archived List of ePortfolio-related Tools and Technologies


For historical purposes, we are keeping a copy of the old page of ePortfolio-Related Tools and Technologies. This list may prove useful to researchers looking at the evolution of ePortfolio. For the active list of ePortfolio-Related Tools, please visit this page.

 

 

ARCHIVED PAGE (5/15/2011)

ePortfolio-related Tools and Technologies

(listed in alphabetical order) 

 

Disclaimer: Please note that the purpose of this list is to provide a comprehensive overview of available ePortfolio-related tools (the definition of what is an ePortfolio is broadly defined).  EPAC does not advocate nor support any specific ePortfolio tool, product, or technology.  Inclusion in this list should not be considered an endorsement.  However, we do try to keep our community informed about the range of products currently in use in order to allow our members to exchange personal experiences, best practices, and suggestions for what questions to keep in mind and issues to consider when deciding which ePortfolio technology to adopt and implement.  This initial list was compiled from existing resources and we welcome any and all suggestions from the EPAC community.

 

 

Most of the above represent some kind of online tools and services.  Other kinds of tools being used to create ePortfolios include:

 

NOTE: There are different deployments of ePortfolio tools that have different implications for learners and institutions. The list below is alphabetical but weare in the process of adding the following notations to indicate the common means of deployment.  We welcome your feedback on whether this approach is useful and how we can improve this coding scheme.

 

Institutional Deployment. (coded 1) In this model, the institution operates the ePortfolio tool and students create portfolios within it. This has advantages for the institution in terms of having a dependable place for capturing student work, and depending on the tool, mechanisms to facilitate institution-wide assessment using the data housed in the tool. Centrally managed login and authorization can facilitate users getting quickly to the spaces they need and for the managing of private spaces for specific uses For learners, this model can offer templates that can structure the portfolio work and help get of the blank page. A down side for learners is that it may be difficult to take the portfolio with them when the leave the institution, and the tool may not allow them to capture all the aspects of their learning, because of specific institution foci for the portfolio.

 

Learner Deployment (coded 2). In this model the learner operates the ePortfolio tool. This might be as simple as a web site, or might be a user managed Drupal deployment. This model gives the user great flexibility, but requires substantial skill and commitment on the part of the learner. More commonly, and similar in in many respects, is the Third-Party deployment.

 

Third-Party Deployment (coded 3). In this model the learner adopts a third party tool, or tools, for the portfolio Two variants of this model of deployment. 1. The tool is specifically designed for use as a portfolio and 2. The tool is "worldware" developed for a broader audience and typically supported with a broadly-based business model. In either of these variants, the learner is in control of the content of the portfolio, not the institution. This kind of portfolio deployment raises problems for the institution related to institutional goals of access to the portfolio for program accountability. It is possible that the learner will take the portfolio down, or exclude the institution from continued access. However, this deployment solves the learner's problem of "taking it with them." The Center for Teaching Learning and Technology at Washington State University is exploring these instutional needs by embedding assessment in-situ, and is calling this technique a "harvesting gradebook." Helen Barrett describes these learner-owned portfolios as "digital archives"http://electronicportfolios.org/web2/index.html and has explored how they can be life-wide and life-long.

 

(With thanks to Nils Peterson of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at Washington State University for his significant contribution of the above categorizations)

 

Resources:

2009.10.15 - Regional Support Centre West Midlands - Kevin Brace's blog: ePortfolio evaluation survey

http://kev-brace.blogspot.com/2009/10/eportoflio-evaluation-survey.html

 

Evaluation of E-Portfolio Software

Klaus Himpsl, Peter Baumgartner, pp. 16-22

International Journal: Emerging Technologies in Learning (IJET), Vol. 4 (1), 2009

http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/831/840

ijet_paper_himpsl_baumgartner.pdf 

Abstract

E-Portfolios are a new type of software and it is still relatively vague to determine, which functions are obligatory – that is which functions constitute characteristic features – and which functions are just optional (“nice to have“). This article describes the concept and the preliminary results of a research project which was conducted to evaluate E-Portfolio software, and aims at providing decision guidance for implementing E-Portfolios in higher education - first and foremost from the pedagogical perspective. Which recommendations can be made to an institution which now wants to implement electronic portfolios with a certain objective?

 

Helen Barrett's Categories of ePortfolio Tools:

http://www.electronicportfolios.com/categories.html

and relevant blog posting: 

http://electronicportfolios.org/blog/2008/12/blogging-and-reflection-in-eportfolios.html

 

EIfEL ePortfolio Solutions Center

http://www.eife-l.org/publications/eportfoliosolutions

 

EduTools ePortfolio Review (also includes criteria for evaluation ePortfolio tools)

http://eportfolio.edutools.info/static.jsp?pj=16&page=HOME

 

Richardson, HC and Ward, R. (2005) Developing and Implementing a Methodology for Reviewing E-portfolio Products: version 1.0 [Online] JISC. Available from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/epfr.doc [accessed 14.11.06]

http://personaldevelopmentplanning.blogspot.com/2006/11/how-good-are-free-e-portfolio-solutions.html [accessed 2009.01.16]

 

Sweat-Guy, R. & N.A. Buzzetto-More. (2007). A Comparative Analysis of Common E-Portfolio Features and Available Platforms. In Proceedings of the 2007 Informing Science and Information Technology Conference, Ljubljana, Slovenia, June 22-25, 2007.

http://proceedings.informingscience.org/InSITE2007/IISITv4p327-342Guy255.pdf [accessed 2009.01.16]

 

Jamin Lietze is a Primary (Elementary) School Teacher in New Zealand.  Here he describes his critieria and process for selecting an ePortfolio tool for his school and students.

http://groups.google.com/group/web2eportfolios/web/ePortfolio%20Criteria%20April%2009.pdf

http://www.lietze.edublogs.org/

 

2008.12 - Choosing ePortfolio Software

From Steve Ehrmann as cited in the TLT Group's recent TGIF (TLT Group Information Forum) Year 3 Issue #7 email:

 

I'm in Australia at the ascilite conference. Lots of interesting conversation about ePortfolios, a hot topic here.

I was asked for my thoughts about how to choose a software package. I think it's a mistake for institutions to assume that a) one software approach will serve all ePortfolio uses, or b) that choosing software is the place for institutions to start. But suppose we're talking about just one institutionalized use of ePortfolios. How should one choose the software?

 

I have one thought to add to the discussion. It begins with a story from 20+ years ago. (That figure is significant, as you'll see.) Around 1985, Prof. Greg Crane and his colleagues from Harvard visited me at the Annenberg/CPB Project, seeking funding for a project to be called "Perseus," a resource for the study of classical Greece from Homer through Alexander the Great. It would include a vast repository of texts, photographs, archaeological documents, and educational material.

 

Greg, a brand new assistant professor, said something in that first conversation that I've always remembered. "If classics professors see Perseus and don't have faith it will be around for 20 years, they will never use it." We agreed that that would be one of the design principles of the project. Because no one could anticipate changes in operating systems, one corollary of the principle was, "The architecture of Perseus ought to enable one to write a program to translate the whole thing, relatively automatically, into a different form that would run in a different operating environment."

 

That threshold was a tight constraint. Within two years several staff, including one co-PI, had left because several ambitious features of Perseus wouldn't fit it.

 

Subsequent research revealed that rewriting educational courseware for a new operating environment was expensive (e.g., writing a Windows version of software that, like Perseus, had been originally written for a Macintosh). the cost of 'porting' to a new environment could easily equal, or exceed, the original development costs. When it came time to port Perseus twice, to the Web and to Windows, the Macintosh version had cost around $3 million. But porting it twice cost only about $50,000.

 

Here's Perseus, 23 years old, and still rowing upstream.

 

So let's return to ePortfolios. It can easily take 5-10 years to institutionalize the reorganization of academic work. It's unlikely that the software one adopts today will still be in use by the end of that period, let alone later. So let's adopt a criterion for system selection: the software should allow one to either (a) export the whole content -- artifacts, reflections, assessments, and relationships -- into a standards-based file that could be uploaded into a different system, or (b) to write a software program that would automatically create such a portable file later on.

 

What do you think? Write me at ehrmann@tltgroup.org.

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